Crossing Over
by MarleeJames
Summary: Set in Season 6. I was living a pretty normal life until two men, whom I'd been sure were just fictional characters, dropped through a set window on the television show I was working on and changed everything. I had a choice. A safe, ordinary life, or the ride of a life-time? No contest, really. There are spoilers for Season 6 and no slash in this story.
1. Chapter 1

**Crossing Over**

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_**Author's Note**_: _Many thanks to BlackIceWitch for the awesome cover art for this story and for beta-reading it. Any mistakes still present are definitely mine. This is my first attempt at writing fan fiction, so I hope you like it._

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**Chapter 1**

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I knew the second they burst through the window, there was something different about them.

At first, I thought they were goofing around, y'know, just having a private joke between themselves. When I watched them get to their feet and look around, I knew it was something else. Something had really happened. I just didn't know what it was.

I'm getting ahead of myself here. I'm one of two script co-ordinators for a television studio in Vancouver, British Columbia. I live in a nothing one bedroom apartment about five minutes walk from the job, and I spend twelve to fifteen hours a day at work. Sounds like a sucky life, doesn't it? It's not too bad. I don't have pets or plants. Just the job.

Twenty-seven years old. Married once, what a friggin' disaster that was. Five foot five in my bare feet, about ninety pounds soaking wet. I always wanted long hair, some romantic and noticeable shade – red or white-blonde or even raven-black, wavy and able to be tossed back over a shoulder with a grand gesture when needed. No such luck. Mine's a non-descript reddish brown. It's curly and thick and when I tried to grow it long it looked like I'd spent the night in a chimney, being dragged up and down by my feet, most mornings, so I finally gave up and cut it all off. It's what my hairdresser, who's pushing sixty, coyly refers to as 'gamine' now – or on a good day, she'll call it a 'pixie' cut. Whatever that means. Basically it's short back and sides and the curls take all the 'gamine' and 'pixie' out of it, and aside from occasionally being mistaken for a guy from the back, it's okay. She streaked the tips. So now it's two-tone, like an old Buick. It's quick to wash anyway.

I started working for the studio out of high school, thanks to my Uncle Harold knowing someone who knew someone, yada yada, and I've worked on two series so far, the current one being my favourite. Yeah, okay, more than a favourite, more like an obsession really.

It's the _characters_. Not the actors, I should explain this up front because although they're nice guys and all, they're not any different to anyone else. No, it was Dean and Sam Winchester that got me started on the downward spiral. So, y'see, when they came out through the window, I really knew. Straight away.

"Cut!" Bobby yelled. "Jared, Jensen, outstanding! That was great!"

Mark held up the slate and said, "Supernatural Scene One, echo, take one. Tail slate. Marker!"

I was watching the scene because I had to give them the script updates for the scenes that were being shot later on. I watched them get off the mattress, muttering to each other and looking around as the director and DoP complained about something to do with the signal. I've worked with the actors for six years. I know them. Whoever the look-alikes standing in front of the broken were, it wasn't them.

Before I could even get going the annoying blonde reporter from Prime Time TV had grabbed Sam and Connie, our so-called make up artist, who apparently thinks everyone looks their best in some variable shade of orange, had grabbed Dean.

Sam didn't have a clue of what the woman standing in front of him, and showing a mouth that looked like it could've subbed for Jaws, was talking about. He looked around in confusion for his brother, but Dean was on the other side of the stage, staring in disbelief at an orange-smeared Kleenex. These two guys _looked_ like the actors, they _sounded_ like the actors, but there was no just no way they _were_ the actors.

Dean stumbled out of the chair and across the stage and I hurried over to him, intercepting him when he stopped to look around for Sam.

"Jensen? Here are the changes for the next scene," I said, looking at him closely.

"What?" He looked down at the pages I held out to him blankly. "I, uh, I – have you seen –"

"Jared?" I asked him. I gestured past the cameras and crew. "He's being interviewed, shouldn't take long. Can you give him the extra pages?"

"Sure, right, okay," he said, taking them. Under the mostly-wiped off make-up, I could see bruises and shadows under his eyes. Definitely not the way Jensen turns up for work. He looked at me and through me, not so much as the faintest spark of recognition in his face. Like I said, I've worked with these guys for six years. It's not a close relationship or anything but when you spend most of a twenty-four hour day in proximity, you get by with a lot of small talk – how was your weekend? Did you see the parade down on Fifth? That kind of thing. This guy, he'd never seen me before in his life.

And I'd noticed his hands as he'd reached for the pages. They were dirty, and scarred, and had oil or grease around his nails. Like someone who worked on their car might. Or someone who was in fights frequently. A labourer. Or maybe even a hunter.

"You're De–"

He turned away just as I was saying it, his attention fully locked onto his brother who'd walked out from behind a bunch of the grips.

"Dude! They put freakin' make-up on us! Those bastards!" he said, striding toward Sam.

"Look, I think I know what this is," Sam said, and I could see the twisted burn scar on his forearm as he yanked down his sleeve. That scar had been on Jared for one scene. Then the budget had been cut and Frank, the really good make-up artist who'd done it had been canned. Since then, none of the scars that the characters had gotten over the years of fighting monsters had been resurrected or even remembered. But the guy standing twenty feet from me still had it.

They turned together, heads bowed as they talked. I couldn't think of a believable reason to be following them and to be honest, I couldn't think at all. Not the actors, the _characters_ were here. Dean Winchester. Sam Winchester. In the real world. Attempting to be themselves.

It was...unbelievable.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

You know when you're sleeping and you're kind of aware that you're sleeping but you're having a really, really great dream and you do _not_ want to wake – _ever_? Well, that's kind of the way I was feeling when I finished tidying up my desk, which was a four-foot square cubicle in one corner of the main writers room, and left at the end of the day.

I'd missed seeing where the Winchesters – and yeah, I was still convinced, more convinced, that they were actually were the Winchesters – had gone, but I saw Clif head out, driving the boxy, black four-wheel drive that looks like a sinister government car in a cheap espionage movie, and figured they were going to Jared's place for the night. Which brought up another really weird question…what the heck happened to the real Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles when the characters dropped in from whatever dimension or space-time continuum they'd dropped in from?

If they'd been switched and were now living in the world that the Winchesters had come from, they could be killed by anything. It was a worrying thought because without them, the series would be a nothing. There wasn't any chance of replacing them with other actors now, they'd made the Winchesters their own.

Wrestling with the main question was giving me a headache. A super-sized one. I stopped at the market and grabbed some Tylenol and headed home, trying not to think about what I'd seen that day.

The apartment looked the same as it always did. Small. Dark. Kind of cluttered. I dumped my bag on the small sofa and went to the kitchen alcove to look in the fridge, grabbing an apple and a soda and chugging it with two of the Tylenol. Then I sat down and tried to make sense of it all.

Dean Winchester had a scar, running from his hairline on the right-hand side of his forehead down to his brow. He'd gotten it in the car-accident after his father had been possessed. The Dean I'd seen today, on the set, had a fine white scar in exactly the same place. Sam Winchester had been burned by Bobby Singer, the character who'd raised them from time to time when their father had been hunting, when he'd been possessed by the demon, Meg. She'd burned a binding sigil into his arm. Bobby had burned a straight line across it to break it. The Sam who'd fallen through the fake window on the set of the Sioux Falls house had had those scars, thick and red and pretty damned nasty-looking.

Dean hadn't recognised me. Sam had barely glanced at me, but only last week Jared had brought a bunch of flowers for me when I'd gotten them the scene sheets early for a rough, packed day of shooting.

Of course, in real life, characters are just figments of the writer's imaginations, right?

Sure they are. Not real. Not actual people. No way, Jose.

The headache was getting worse, not better, and I finished the apple and tossed the core in the trash on the way to the bedroom. Maybe it was a dream, I thought. Maybe the whole day had been a dream, brought on by too much re-watching of the seasons on DVD and too many late-night hours spent reading the better class of fan-fiction online and I'd just hallucinated the whole day.

In a way that would be reassuring. I pulled off my clothes, throwing all but my jeans into the hamper and tossing the jeans over the arm of the small chair next to my bed. It would mean I wasn't going nuts. That had to be a good thing.

But…I thought as I pulled the comforter over me and wriggled down into my favourite position in the bed…it would mean that Dean and Sam weren't here. Weren't real. Would never be real.

I looked at the shadowed wall on the other side of the room. Suppose, for just a moment, I thought to myself, entertaining the idea, they _were_ real. That I wasn't dreaming or hallucinating or having a mental breakdown. What would you do, I asked myself? What could I do, I wondered?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I walked onto the set at five a.m., feeling as if I was going to need my caffeine delivered intravenously to survive after the crap night of tossing and turning I'd done through the night-time hours. I followed Bob and Serge through the house set, handing out the scenes to the crew as I passed them and realised I'd left the Tylenol at home.

"We finish today in twelve hours if it kills us all. Get 'A' and 'B' cam for Scene Twelve," Bob said, walking through the kitchen mockup and into the living room set, looking at the two men standing there. "What is this?"

Stopping in the doorway, I saw him turn to Dean and Sam with a surprised look. "Here for the first run-through, before anyone else? Dedication."

Dean glanced at his brother as Sam picked up the box and walked out of the living room. "Uh, can I talk to you for a second? Um, we're gonna need the, uh, set cleared for, safe side, an hour or so."

"You need it cleared." Bob looked at him carefully.

"Yeah. Yeah. Me and, um...Jared were gonna do some actor stuff," Dean said, trying a smile.

Bob heaved in a deep breath. "Jensen, we're thrilled to see you collaborating so creatively," he said with a patient smile.

How could he not see that it wasn't Jensen he was talking to, I wondered? Looking at him closely, he didn't even really look that much like Jensen, at least, not when the cameras weren't pointing at him. He looked like Dean. Uncomfortable, sweaty-palmed, unable to come up with a decent lie Dean.

"And your enthusiasm is refreshing. Dean Cain was like that on 'Lois', and that man's a real actor," he said, looking pointedly at Dean. "And we will clear this set exactly when we shoot the two and three-eighths pages we are scheduled to shoot on this set. So you do your 'actor stuff' and we'll do our 'camera stuff' and, uh…" he let the sentence trail away with a suggestive hand-wave.

Dean nodded, tried for another smile and gave up, frowning as he walked back off the set, past me and over to his brother.

"Ooh, Priority. What's in it?" Misha came onto the back stage area, in costume, and peered at the box, taking his seat behind Sam.

"I bought part of a dead person," Sam said, watching his brother walk over.

"Oh…cool," Misha said, eyebrows shooting up.

"Uh, so, bad news. Uh...looks like we're gonna have to do a little acting," Dean said uncomfortably to Sam.

"What?" Sam's head snapped up to look at his brother.

As if everything else hadn't been proof enough, that one look was the decider. Both of them looked like they'd rather face a firing squad than have to go through the next few hours.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Supernatural, Scene Thirty-Six, take one. Marker!"

Mark snapped the slate and moved out of shot, and Bob called, "Action!"

From behind the camera, where I was standing, I could see into the room. Sam was frozen in place and Dean was glowering at Misha, who walked toward the camera while delivering his line, "Balthazar is no hero. But he knows Raphael will never take him back."

Misha turned back to them and Sam flinched slightly, then Dean walked stiffly closer to Misha, looking down as he stopped. His mark, taped to the floor, was a few more inches to the right and he moved over to it, then looked back up at the actor.

"Cut!" Bob shouted exasperatedly. I sighed, turning away and heading for the catering van. It would take a while to get through this scene at this rate.

"Terry!"

I turned around, closing the stage door behind me, and saw Jim standing there. "Hey, Jim."

"You seen Jensen and Jared this morning?"

"No," I said, without thinking. "Uh, sorry, yeah, they're inside. Shooting scene thirty-six, actually."

"Thanks," he said, walking past me then turning back. "How'd they seem to you this morning?"

"Oh, okay, I guess," I said, hoping my smile would seem more positive than the tone of my voice. "Why?"

"No reason," he said, looking back to the door. "Just, you know, heard a few things."

I nodded and turned away, not wanting to hear what he'd been hearing. The big catering van was fifty yards up the internal road of the lot and I walked there quickly, grabbing a giant double-espresso and three bear claws, rearranging the folder of script changes, coffee, pastries and my wallet and phone to be able to carry them all back to the stage.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Supernatural. Scene Thirty-Six, take eight. Marker!"

"Action!" Bob called out.

I set my coffee down on the prop table and watched as Sam twitched and shifted from foot to foot, folding his arms, crossing and uncrossing them, trying one on a hip. He looked like someone had poured itching powder inside all of his clothes. Beside him, Dean was still glowering at Misha.

"Balthazar is no hero. But he knows Raphael will never take him back," the actor said, looking at Dean.

"Dean, grimly. And yet, somehow you got no problem with it," Dean said belligerently, his gaze dropping to the pages in his hand that were out of camera shot.

"Cut!"

Misha turned around to the director, mouthing something at him and Bob shrugged, waiting for the slate to mark the next take.

"Action."

"That's because ...that's because we have no other choice," Sam said uncertainly, his head turning from Misha to the front of the set.

"Don't look at the camera," Dean advised him from the corner of his mouth.

Turning to look at him, Sam said, "What?"

"Look anywhere but the camera," Dean added, looking at the floor.

"That's because we have no other choice!" Sam said adamantly, tipping his head back, his gaze wandering across the ceiling.

"Cut!" Bob yelled. "For the love of ..."

I ate all three pastries and finished the mega coffee over the next few takes. They were getting worse, I thought. Sam was almost hyperventilating as he looked at Misha, and Dean was checking his marks, and reading the pages held half behind his back.

"Action!"

"Take fourteen. Marker!"

Dean stared blankly at Misha.

"Cut!"

"Take twenty-two. Marker!"

Sam dropped his script and dove to the floor, scrabbling around to pick it up.

"CUT!"

"Take twenty-six. Marker!"

Sam walked unsteadily toward Misha, one arm held stiffly in front of him. "If there's a key, then," he said, lifting his other arm and glancing down at the floor to see his mark. "There must also be a lock."

"Cut!" Bob said, scratching his temple with his fingertips and looking at Serge who was wincing with every line now.

"Take thirty-one. Marker!"

"Action."

Sam tried again, arm held out stiffly as he walked toward Misha, veering slightly to get around Dean. "If there's a key ... then there has to be a lock."

Even I flinched when I saw Dean do a double-take at his brother's hand as it came past him. He seemed to remember where he was a second later, turning a black scowl back on Misha.

"And when we find the lock, we can get the weapons, and then we can have the weapons," he said. "And the lock," he added uncertainly, glancing at his brother. "We'll still have the lock, I imagine, because we've opened it, and, of course, the initial key."

"We need to get all three of that crap," he growled deeply, glaring at Misha.

"What?" Sam looked at him in surprise.

"That's how he does it," Dean muttered at him, making a face to along with the small shrug.

"Oh."

That was it. The breaking point. Dean stepped back, looking through the set window at Bob. "Do we really need all these lines?" he called out, his voice a lot higher than it been in the last two hours. "I mean, I-I-I-I think we've covered it. Hey?"

Bobby stared at him, his mouth dropping open. "Cut! What _is_ happening?" he asked the room at large, twisting around in his chair. "What's happening?! What's _happening_?!"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I hurried around to the kitchen set. It would take forty minutes to set up the next scene and that was all the time I was gonna get.

They were at the table, unpacking the cardboard box Sam had brought in.

"What are you doing?" I hissed at them, looking around to make sure no one else was nearby.

"Who the hell are you?" Dean asked, shoving whatever he'd just pulled out of the box back into it.

"I'm Terry," I said, walking to the side of the table and looking back at him determinedly. I felt schizophrenic. On the one hand, I had a job to do. On the other, I was talking to Dean Winchester. "I'm the idiot who keeps your scripts up to date and in order and let's you know the changes so that it's not a great friggin' surprise."

He exchanged a look with Sam, who was pulling out stuff and setting it out of sight behind the box.

"Oh."

"You two really have no clue who I am, do you?" I asked, just to get this absolutely and unmistakably straight. Close-up they really did look like Jensen and Jared. It was unnerving. "You've never seen me before."

Sam looked at me then, his forehead wrinkling up. "Sure, Terry, don't worry about him, he had a hard night last night."

Dean glanced at him and back to me. "Right, Terry, yeah, sorry, hard night."

"Bullshit," I said. "You're not Jensen and Jared."

Sam laughed uncomfortably. "Who else would we be?"

"Dean and Sam Winchester." I looked from him to Dean. "Really, Dean and Sam Winchester."

They both looked around the set, then at each other.

"Those are, uh, characters, in a tv show," Dean said quickly. "Not real."

"Except that you are. Real. Now." I looked at the tattered script hanging half out of his jacket pocket. "And sooner or later, it won't be just me, everyone else is going to look past the look-alike aspect and wonder what the heck is going on."

I thought they'd argue, but Dean looked down at the box and then back up. "How'd you figure it?"

"Dean and Sam have scars. Jensen and Jared don't," I said bluntly, waving my hand in the direction of his forehead. "And they can act. You two can't."

"It's this freakin' script –" Dean started to protest, and Sam shook his head at him.

"We're trying to get out of here and we think it'll go back to normal once we've gone," he said in a low voice. "Do you know how much time we've got?"

Looking at my watch, I said, "About twenty-five minutes. You're in the next scene and the one after. Then you're done till this evening."

"This evening?" Dean looked at his watch. "How long do they make these saps work?"

"Normally? Twelve to fifteen hours a day in the middle of a season," I said tartly. "At the moment, you've got some free time because this episode has a few different characters."

"Any suggestions on how we get through those if this doesn't work?" Sam asked me, his mouth contorting into an unhappy smile.

"Be yourselves," I said, looking over my shoulder as the sound of hammering came from behind a wall. "These characters are you, just be yourselves instead of trying to act."

"That's easier said than –" Dean said, pulling a face.

"Shut it," Sam said, passing him a plastic-wrapped item from the box. "Let's just concentrate on getting out of here."

"Can you, uh, keep a – you know, a watch out for us?" Dean asked me, unwrapping the item quickly.

I nodded and moved away, back to the doorway to the living room area of the set. My heart was thundering and I suddenly realised my palms were damp with sweat. I was talking to them. Dean and Sam. And they were going to leave – that brought me up sharply. I didn't know what the heck I could do about that.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Terry!"

I turned around, just as I heard the crash of the window from inside the set.

"Where the hell have you been?" Karen demanded, striding across the set. "There are updates coming in from LA and you were supposed to be done with this and back an hour ago!"

"Sorry," I said, catching up to her as she swung around and heading back to the stage door.

"Well, get a move on, I'm supposed to be seeing Jim and Bob in ten minutes, some kind of emergency, and those changes are sitting on your desk," she snapped, stopping by the door. "Make sure they're all done by the time I get back, we'll have to hand them out before everyone goes tonight."

"Will do," I promised, going through the door and running down to the office. If I could really burn through them, I might be able to catch up with the Winchesters before they left for the night. Or find them later, maybe. I ran faster. I wasn't sure of what the plan was, but I wanted one, some kind of plan, at least.

They were real. They were here and it wasn't make-believe or actors and scripts. Y'know, I didn't really think it through too well, in hindsight. I didn't think of how their world was, with the monsters and demons and ghosts and angels. I just thought about how my world was … with the job that took all my time and the crappy little apartment that took about a third of my weekly paypacket, and the wish that I could meet someone who thought that putting themselves in between a supernatural danger and an innocent person was the right thing to do.

I could've dated a fire-fighter, or a cop, if I'd thought that one through a little more carefully.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

To be continued…

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_First-time at writing a story so if you liked it, I hope you'll let me know. If you didn't or you have some suggestions to make it better, I hope you'll let me know that too._


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

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The office was quiet and dark and I was going as fast as I could, just knowing I was gonna be too late. I hit 'Print' on the screen and pushed my chair back, running to the printer and grabbing the pages as they came out, stapling them together and dumping the sets onto the printer's bland grey cover.

_Are you seriously contemplating chasing after them_, I asked myself for the millionth time? _Even if they find a way back_, which according to the scripts that were churning out into the tray, through my hands and onto the pile, was not a sure thing yet, _what the heck do you think you'll do in their world?_

I didn't know. All I knew, for sure, right at that moment, was that Fate or destiny or something had put an opportunity in front of me that I couldn't look away from. I mean, you spend your life in total normality…nearly total normality, I amended to myself…and something like this happens, something you've been telling yourself for years that you wanted…_magic_…and how cowardly would I be to look the other way? If there was anything here to cling on to, it would be different, I argued with myself. There wasn't.

Gathering the armful of warm, printed pages, I ran back to the desk, and opened the huge leather folder that I used to lug all the crap about the series around in. It'd been my father's and the embossed initials on the lower corner were still vaguely visible. Inside, it was packed full of typed and hand-written pages, notes scribbled on scraps of paper, a complete copy of the concordance of the series. I had everything from every writers meeting and coffee-machine conversation in there. I slapped the scripts in the middle, closed the folder and tucked it under my arm, grabbed my bag and raced out through the door.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I heard the shots as soon as I came out the door. Not blanks, I thought instantly, knowing the flatter sound of those. The boom of a shotgun, the louder concussion of a handgun. For a split-second, I thought the sound editors were playing around with the speaker systems, literally unable to credit that there was real gun-fire on the lot, then I realised how stupid that was and started to run.

Our stage was two blocks away, and I saw a guy in a black suit walking casually up the road toward it as I reached the corner. For some insane reason, the show's creator and, up 'til recently, producer, was walking toward him, blood covering his chest, his expression blank but his hand still raised in what could only have been a friendly wave. The man in the black suit lifted the handgun, some monster thing that sounded like a cannon and the bullet hit Eric in the chest, knocking him backward onto the ground.

Black Suit turned and started toward the open door of the stage and I pulled out my phone and dialled 9-1-1.

"Emergency, what service do you require?" The pert voice on the other end of the line chirped at me.

"Police, ambulance. There's a shooting at the studio, Building M, Grandview Road."

"Ma'am, could we take your –"

I ended the call and pushed the phone back into my bag. There were three entrances to the stage. Four sets were in there, the Singer house kitchen and living room, a motel room interior, built for this episode, the open green screen set with the car sitting in front of it, and a room holding all the weapons of Heaven, also built for this episode. It wasn't the biggest stage on the lot but it was still pretty damned big.

Black Suit had to be looking for the Winchesters, I thought, flinching at another rattle of gun-fire from inside the studio. I turned from the corner and ran along the wall to the personnel door that was halfway along the building. Which set would they be on? I couldn't remember which scenes they were shooting first.

The door opened easily and I stumbled through it, blinking madly at the change from bright light to the near darkness at this end of the stage.

"HEY!"

I heard Sam's shout, past the green screen and somewhere in the middle and took off, barely able to see where I was going in the gloom, narrowly avoiding the cranes, dolly tracks, tables and chairs that seemed to fill the open spaces around the half-rooms, a demented obstacle course that was making me feel as if I was in one of those nightmares where no matter how fast you run, the thing behind is always gaining.

A deep grunt and the crash of someone falling snapped me back to reality and I realised they were on the motel room set, half-turning and pelting toward it. I didn't know what I was gonna do when I got there, it just seemed like getting there was the main goal. I didn't even see the cable snaking across the floor as I came around to the open set – one minute I was running fine on two feet, the next I was flying.

"Dean! Got it!" I heard Sam yell at his brother, landing on my hands and knees in a long, painful skid across the cheap, synthetic carpet on the set's floor.

"Raphael! Run!"

I looked up as both brothers turned away from a glowing red light behind them, staggered to my feet and took a step then I was flung through the broken window behind them, feeling a piece of stage glass brush along my leg in one fraction of a second, then cut deeply through my jeans in the next.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I'd love to be able to tell you all about what happened next, but I can't. From the lump on the side of my head when I woke up, I gave the old melon a whopping great thump on something hard and unyielding when I landed and managed to put myself out for the count.

I woke up on a sofa in the Singer house living room set. Or at least, that's where I thought I woke up. Turns out that wasn't right either.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Rain. Thunder. Pounding in my head. Hammering somewhere very close by.

Must be on the set, I thought blurrily, forcing my eyes to open a little. Hammering. Definitely hammering.

From the narrow field between my squinted-up eyelids, I could see the familiar gold-flocked dark red wallpaper on the walls of the set, piles of books and notes, the dark-stained wood doorway. There was something off about it, but I couldn't work out what it was.

"I'm sorry about all this," a deep, rough voice that was slightly familiar said somewhere nearby. "I'll explain when I can."

There was a soft sound of wings, flapping in the room.

"Friggin' angels," another deep voice said, and that one I knew. I opened one eye a little wider, in time to see Sam Winchester walk over to the doorway and thump it.

"Solid," he said. "It's real. It's nice."

"Yeah," the deep voice belonging to his brother said from the other side of the room. "Yeah, real, mouldy, termite-eaten home sweet home. Chock full of crap that wants to skin you."

He walked over to his brother. "Oh, and uh, we're broke again."

Sam's voice held a smile. "Yeah … but, hey, at least we're talking."

I opened the other eye to see Dean give him a sour look and turned my head, wishing I hadn't when my stomach rolled over and a huge throbbing pain started behind one eye. I screwed both eyes shut quickly.

"She's awake." I heard Dean say, then the unmistakable sound of two pairs of boots thumping across the floor.

"Not really," I whispered, pressing my palm against the side of my head. "What happened?"

There was a silence and I reluctantly opened an eye again. They were both beside the sofa, looking at each other.

"Uh, well …" Sam said, turning away. "Um …"

"Let's just say … you're not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy," Dean cut in, his gaze shifting. "Gotta headache?"

"Yes."

"Big lump on the side of your head too," he informed me, not very sympathetically.

I suddenly got what seemed off about the room. It smelled. Really smelled, the dampness in the air bringing it out. It smelled of old books and old carpet and old upholstery, of dust and a sharp tang of some kind of acid and more vaguely of cheap bourbon.

The set didn't smell of anything. At all.

I sat up and looked around, clenching my teeth shut against the nauseating roll of my stomach that accompanied the pain thudding in my head. It had four walls. Well…three and a half, to accommodate the wide archway leading to the kitchen. Rain was drumming against the thick plastic sheet that had been nailed over a broken window. There was a background stench of wet ash from the blackened fireplace.

"Are w-w-we –?" I stuttered, looking through the open door to a hallway with a set of stairs leading up. From the sofa that doorway had only ever looked into the back-stage. "Is this –? A-a-a-am I –?"

Sam walked back into the living room from the kitchen, holding a glass of water and a small bottle. He handed both to me, nodding. "Yeah, we are. This is Bobby's place, the real Bobby Singer. And you're here. Not back there."

I looked down at the glass in my hand. I knew it was there for a reason. I knew I was supposed to do something with it. But I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what that was.

"Shock," Dean said to Sam, moving to the sofa and taking the bottle of pills, opening it, shaking two into his palm. "Take these, drink that. You'll feel better."

"What?"

He handed me the pills and I swallowed them obediently, chasing them down with a mouthful of water.

"Go to sleep," Sam advised me, taking the glass back and straightening up. He looked at his brother. "Ideas on what we're going to do about this?"

"Fresh out," Dean said, turning away with a shrug. "We'll stay here, till Bobby gets back. Figure it out then."

"What about Raphael and Cas and the weapons?"

"Figure that out too," Dean said. "She's got my bed, I'm taking Bobby's."

His voice was getting further away and my eyelids were closing as the painkillers started to slowly numb me from the inside out. I couldn't imagine what he was talking about. What either of them were talking about. _Weirdest dream ever_, I thought dazedly, slumping back against the cushions that were piled at one end of the sofa. _Dean and Sam and rain_.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I was warm and comfortable, my head aching a bit but my stomach quiet. Some dream, I thought, keeping my eyes closed and listening to the sound of birdsong somewhere outside.

You must be thinking that I'm some kind of major wimp, and sure, yeah, I'll buy that, but give me a chance. I didn't really know what was going on in the motel set back where I came from, and unless you're a deep, deep sci-fi – or SYFY – fan, travelling through dimensions doesn't hit the top of the list of rational explanations for most of us. The last thing that I really remembered was Sam shouting out in the room, my foot getting caught on something and going flying.

I didn't get my head around what'd really happened until I opened my eyes and saw the grimy, smoke-stained ceiling above me, a massive crack running through it, and through a red-painted circle filled with strange symbols and drawings.

_Seen that before_, I thought vaguely. I had but it took another minute before I remembered where I'd seen it. It wasn't a regular part of the set. It was included for the episode when Meg possessed Sam in Season Two. It wasn't left there.

I sat up, tossing aside the blanket that was covering me and looking around. My head gave a few lazy throbs but the pills must have been extra-strength because it was distant, not immediate.

My leg hurt like hell when I stood up and I looked down to see my jeans were now full length on one leg and sliced to shorts-length on the other and there was a bulky looking white bandage wrapped around my leg just above the knee. It hurt. A dim memory of being cut came back and I limped my way across the room and into the kitchen.

I'd always thought they'd exaggerated the character's bachelor habits as a kind of ongoing joke on Bob Singer. Nope. From one side of the kitchen to the other, there were dirty dishes, pots, pans, cups and mugs half-drunk and left, interesting wall murals of fast-growing moulds and fungi … I repressed a small shudder and looked carefully at the coffee-pot. It was hot, almost-full and wafting a very tempting aroma into the kitchen and I was pretty sure it was mostly clean.

The growl of a car and the crunching sound of gravel came from outside and I turned around, going to the window. A familiar-looking black car pulled into the yard, followed by an old Chevy Nova painted in a variety of primer colours.

I clutched my cup, wondering what I could say.

The front door banged open.

"I've been getting blasts from hunters all week, all kinds of crap," a whiskey-roughened voice said in the hallway.

The oil-stained cap was the first thing that I noticed, then the scraggly reddish-grey beard. He looked so much like Jim that I nearly said that name.

"You're up, at last," Bobby Singer said to me as he walked into the living room and dumped a couple of books and a folded-up map onto his desk. "How's the head?"

"Good, um, Mr Singer," I said, swallowing the desire to call him by the name I knew.

He shook his head impatiently. "Bobby'll do."

"You two," he called out, turning to look at the doorway. "Get your asses in here and look at this."

Sam came in, his expression tense. "Bobby we got other problems –"

"And the most pressing one is up," Dean added as he followed his brother into the room.

"How you doing?" Sam asked, looking critically at the bandage on my leg.

"Fine," I said automatically. "Good, I mean, considering."

Dean snorted and walked over to the desk. "What about the hunters?"

"Here," Bobby said, spreading the map over the desk. "Nest of vamps. Werewolf dance party. Shifters, six of them. Two hunters died taking them out. Ghouls, ghouls. Ghoul-wraith smorgasbord."

Sam turned back to his brother and the older hunter, looking at the map.

"Is it just me, or is that a straight kick-line down I-80?" Dean asked, studying the route.

"Exactly."

"Looks to me like it's a Sherman march monster mash," Dean commented, glancing at his brother.

"Yeah, but where are they marching to?"

Bobby picked up a pen and drew something on the map.

"What is it?" Sam's forehead wrinkled up as he pivoted around to read the name outlined in red pen.

"Guy bashes in his family's heads," Bobby said sourly, looking at Dean.

The conversation would've been weird at any time, but what was weirder was that it sounded familiar. Not something I'd heard, but something else, something I'd read, maybe.

"What do we do with Dorothy here?" Dean asked, turning to look at me. The joke was getting old real fast and I kept my expression neutral with a lot of effort.

Bobby looked over the desk. "Not having any luck with getting hold of Cas, so we can't send you back."

The thought of being sent back provoked a wave of feeling. Some of it was relief, a sly little worm that I wasn't going to be a part of a ghoul-wraith smorgasbord. But a lot was alarm. I'd just gotten here. There had to be something I could do.

"You alright to hang out here for a while?" Sam asked me quietly. "We've gotta get going on this," he added, turning and jerking his thumb at the map on the desk. "And we can't take passengers."

"I'll be fine," I said, lifting my chin slightly as I saw Dean's disbelieving smirk from the corner of my eye. "I could help out, if you have something that needs doing?"

"What _can_ you do?" he asked, the doubt in his voice blatant but just short of mocking.

"I can answer those phones," I said, looking at him and waving a hand at the bank of phones along the kitchen wall. They'd only appeared in episode four of the current season, but I'd been there for Jensen's directorial debut and I'd seen the routine. "Just give me a list."

Bobby grinned suddenly, pushing his cap back. "That would be a help, I can ride along, handle the fibbie side of things if the phones are covered."

With an exaggerated sigh, Dean shrugged and turned away. "Fine, you do that," he said shortly, and looked at Bobby. "We'll get going, meet you down there."

Bobby nodded, watching them leave. "Don't get started till I'm there," he called out as an afterthought. The door slammed behind them and he looked back at me.

"Didn't see any signs of concussion, and that leg wound is a clean cut, shouldn't give you any trouble," he said, getting up from behind the desk. "Sorry we can't get you home straight away, but the way things are going, there's just no way to do it."

"That's okay," I said, nodding to him.

"How's it you know about all this again?" he asked me curiously, glancing over his shoulder as the black car growled its way out of the yard. "The boys didn't say much."

I opened my mouth to tell him, then hesitated for a second, wondering if they'd been vague deliberately. If they hadn't wanted Bobby to know what had happened, they should have said something, I thought, a bit defiantly, remembering Dean's attitude. "They said that an angel pushed them through into my world," I started, feeling relieved when he nodded. "And I didn't realise that they were being dragged back here when I found them on the motel set."

"Motel set?" Bobby's brows rose an inch or two.

"It was a TV show," I said, realising what they hadn't mentioned, and guessing at the reason why. "Called Supernatural. About two brothers who hunted monsters and brought on the Apocalypse by releasing Lucifer from his cage."

His mouth dropped open. "In your world, their lives were a TV show?!"

I nodded. "I worked on it for six years," I told him. "I'm not sure how accurate it all was."

He looked at me. "You know about their Dad?"

"John Winchester," I said. "Mary was killed by a demon called Azazel who was feeding Sam demon blood –"

"Holy SHIT!" Bobby said, taking a step back. "And Dean? You know what happened to Dean?"

"Going to Hell?" I asked, a bit uncertainly. A lot of things had happened to Dean.

He nodded. "Shit, don't tell 'em you know all that," he said, rubbing his hand over his jaw distractedly. "Dean'll never talk to you again."

"But –"

"Look, I gotta go, but can ya stay here? Till we get back?" he asked me, his tone close to a plea. "This is – maybe we can figure out a way to use this, somehow."

"I can stay," I said, feeling a tiny morsel of hope rising at his words. If I could be useful … that would be different, that would be better.

"Thanks," he said, turning for the door and then looking back over his shoulder. "We might be gone about a week, driving time included. That okay? There's money for groceries and anything you need in a box under my bed. Just cash."

"Okay," I said, wondering how much cash I had in my purse. "I've got some money."

He stopped in the doorway and shook his head. "We'll try and get you back, but you gotta know now, there's no guarantee we'll be able to."

That made me swallow uncomfortably. I didn't even think about it being a one-way trip. "I'll keep it in mind."

"The list of contacts for those phones is under 'em," he said, looking over at the row. "Just tell 'em you'll take a message and call me. My number's on the wall too."

"Okay."

"Don't open the door to anyone."

"I won't."

"If you hear something, salt every door and window and grab the shotgun upstairs and sit tight."

"I will."

"Okay then," he said, turning away and walking down the hall. I heard the front door slam and sagged back against the small kitchen table behind me, staring down into my cup of rapidly-cooling coffee. Grab the shotgun? What the heck did I think I was doing?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I sat around for a couple of days, answering the phones when they rang and passing on the details to Bobby if they were urgent or just taking messages if they weren't. Someone had put a couple of big, knobbly stitches in the cut on my leg and although it wasn't pretty, it was healing up. My first scar, I thought, looking at it every morning. The headaches passed after the second decent night's sleep and by mid-afternoon on the second day in the house, I was ready to climb the walls for something constructive to do.

Looking around, it didn't take all that long to figure out what.

The kitchen was the first point of attack. I took the man at his word, grabbing the money from under his bed and going to the store a few blocks down the road, coming back with every kind of cleaner they had on their shelves.

I didn't want to mess up whatever kind of filing system Bobby was using to find information in the ramshackle mess of the living room, but I thought I could put the books away and dust and vacuum and wash the curtains, clean out the fireplace, patch the ceiling and do my best to get the blood-stains out of the carpet. Wandering through the house I found that there was another living room behind a closed door, probably the original, on the other side of the hallway, and the room currently being used for that purpose was probably the dining room. As soon as the thought hit I had a vivid flash of the house, clean and neat and with a dining table in the middle of the room, and realised that was from Season Five, episode fifteen. It was filmed before fourteen, I remembered belatedly. There had to be a dining table somewhere around.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

It was nine in the evening, five days later when I heard the cars pull into the yard. Bobby had rung from Vermont, explaining the delay.

"What's that smell?" Dean said, his tone suspicious, as he came into the hall.

Sam sniffed exaggeratedly. "Fabric softener and roast beef."

"What the hell?" They stopped together in the doorway to the dining room, staring around them.

"What the hell did you do here?" Dean asked me accusingly.

The room – well, okay, the house – looked different, I had to admit it. It was clean, for one thing. And tidy. And Bobby's study and living room were back in the original living room. I didn't mean to make so many changes, but I just kind of got on a roll and kept going.

Bobby pushed past them and stopped, looking around as well. "Looks nice," he said neutrally. "That dinner?"

Dean threw him a disbelieving look, deepening into a scowl as Bobby walked into the kitchen at my nod and washed his hands in the sink.

"Come on, you two, wash up, we'll eat and then we'll figure out what we're going to do about Eve."

I got out of the way as Dean stormed past, Sam following more slowly, a slight smile playing on his mouth as he looked around and flashed me an approving look.

The look was reassuring but the familiarity of the name caught at me. "Who's Eve?" I asked Sam.

"Mother of All," Sam said, looking over his shoulder as he washed his hands. "The monster we over to Ohio to –"

"Don't need chapter and verse," Dean cut him off repressively, wiping his hands on the towel on the rail and tossing it over his shoulder at his brother.

"Mother of All," I repeated, mostly to myself. That was definitely familiar and I suddenly realised why. "Oh … god."

I dropped the dish-cloth I'd been holding and raced upstairs, a million thoughts attacking me at the same time. _What an idiot_, I ranted at myself as I hit the door to my room, at the end of the hall, past the other bedrooms and slammed my palm against the light-switch. _No wonder they think you're an idiot_, I continued, crossing the room in two strides to grab the leather folder, and swinging around to head back down the stairs. _You _are_ an idiot, how could you have forgotten? HOW!?_

"What –" Dean started to say as I ran back into the dining room and slapped the leather folder down on the dining table.

"I knew it, what you said, about the guy bashing his family's head in – it was so familiar, but I couldn't place it, couldn't get why," I babbled helplessly at Bobby, pulling the buckles free on the leather straps that held the folder together and opening it up. "It was the next episode and we only had the first draft but I knew it seemed like I should know what was going on, and then when you said 'Eve', my god, that was like –"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Dean cut in impatiently, looking at the folder.

I picked up the typed outlines I'd done two weeks ago, in Vancouver, in another world, handing one to each of them.

"Eve, the Mother of All, that episode was the introduction to her," I explained, waving a hand at the pages they were holding. "Your grandfather was there, wasn't he?"

Dean looked up then, his eyes almost black with an emotion I couldn't identify and didn't want to know. I got the gist when Bobby's gaze snapped to him and then to me.

"What's this?"

"The outlines," I said, a bit more slowly, looking at him. "The show – the outlines were sent out weeks in advance, for the location scouts, the set designers, the make-up and costume people. The writers, I have –" I looked down at the folder, pulling out the scripts that I had drafts for. "I have the next six episodes, drafts only, there's still going to be some changes, because sometimes we couldn't get the right location or the right actor, but –"

"This is a blueprint of what's going happen – here?" Sam asked me tersely. I nodded.

"I'm so sorry, I just – there was so much to take in, and I just forgot!"

Dean's mouth tightened and he swung away, striding out of the room and into the hall. A moment later the front door swung open and slammed shut.

"I'm sorry," I said again to Bobby. "I –"

He shook his head, his face tightening a little. "It's okay."

Looking at Sam's bowed head, I could see it wasn't. Not by a long way. But the younger Winchester lifted his head and looked at me.

"It wasn't your fault," he said, his voice firm. "We knew what you did on the show, we forgot as well." He looked past me to the empty hall. "Dean'll be as angry about that as about you forgetting, Terry."

It didn't help, not really. It was my job and I'd known what the folder held. They hadn't.

"Sam, go get your brother," Bobby said, turning to the kitchen. "I'm starving, we'll eat and go through this."

Sam nodded and headed out to the yard, and I looked at Bobby.

"I can't –"

He pulled open the oven door and took out the pan. "Don't let him chase you off," he warned me, looking over his shoulder. "He'll get over it."

I shook my head and turned away, remembering the details of the outline, of the first draft of the script. They could've saved Gwen, could've saved Rufus, even Samuel if they'd had an inkling of what had been there.

"Terry," Bobby said loudly from the kitchen. I stopped and looked back at him. "It is Terry, right?"

I nodded. "Therese Alcott."

"Therese, that's nice, I like that better," Bobby said, waving a hand at the clean dresser full of clean plates. "I need a hand here."

For a second, I wanted to run up to the room I'd cleaned for myself, run and hide and never come back down. I didn't want to see that accusing stare again. Didn't want hear the glass-edged comments or see them in his face, even if he didn't say a word.

"You start running now, you'll never stop," Bobby said quietly, retrieving the pan of roasted vegetables from the oven and setting them beside the pan. "Stand up to it, face it down. It'll get better."

In the real world, that kind of decision had never really come up. I mean, I'd stood down bosses and co-workers occasionally, held my ground when I'd thought I was right. But I wasn't right this time. I'd let them down and people had died because of that. _Stay and face it_, I thought, quivering inside. _Or admit that you're a coward and have no business being here at all._

I nodded to him and went to get out the dishes, passing him a couple of platters at the same time as he started to carve.

"Good girl." I heard him say as I took the plates and set the table.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_Hope you liked the second chapter. More than a hint of what's yet to come._


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

* * *

I sat at the end of the table, opposite Bobby. Dean sat in the chair at Bobby's right hand and Sam deliberately took the chair opposite but one closer to me. It was a nice gesture. It earned him another black look from his brother.

The three men ate fast. I wasn't sure if that was a compliment to the cooking or if they'd have put away week-old take-away at the same speed. All of them left their dishes clean anyway.

"Good to have a home-cooked meal for a change," Bobby said, looking down the table at me. "Thanks."

"Yeah," Sam said, chewing and swallowing the food in his mouth hurriedly. "Thank you."

Dean stared at the folder that sat next to Bobby's left hand.

"You're welcome," I said, feeling uncomfortably as if I'd somehow asked for that attention. I couldn't have told you if the food was any good or not, I couldn't taste it. I ate enough to make sure it didn't look like I was trying to poison them – something I'm sure went through Dean's mind when I set the plates in front of them – and got to my feet, carrying the empty plates away to the sink.

In case you're thinking that I'm some kind of Betty Crocker-wannabe home-maker, let me set your mind at rest. I'm not. I just found it a lot easier to breathe naturally twenty feet from the nuclear reactor disguised as a man than I did sitting at the table within his blast zone.

I grabbed the full pot of coffee and took it back to the table, and Sam went and got clean cups from the cupboard and Bobby waved a hand at the chair next to him.

"Alright, let's hear how this works," he said, pushing the folder to me.

"Filming takes a few months. Most of the season's storyline is decided during the hiatus, over the summer months when the show isn't on," I started, keeping my eyes firmly fixed to the pages in front of me. "Some of the writers get their scripts in early, some late. They're supposed to stick to a rough outline of what's going to happen, building additional stories and character development into that main storyline."

"Which is?" Sam asked, leaning on the table to look at the folder. "You had a draft of the episode that followed the one where Balthazar shoved us into your world – what happens after that?"

"Bear in mind, this isn't a hundred percent bedded down yet," I said carefully, not wanting them to think it was going to be a gold-plated guarantee. Some of the draft scripts really were rough. "The next episode draft is where Balthazar unsinks the Titanic."

"What?" Bobby choked on his coffee and I patted him awkwardly on the back. "The Titanic?"

"Yeah. Apparently, he decides to divert it from ever hitting the iceberg."

"Is that possible?" Dean asked Bobby. "Cas always said no one could change destiny."

"Got me," Bobby answered him, turning back to me. "How do we fit into that?"

I looked down at the pages, uncertain of how to explain the idea. "In the first draft, it seems like Cas asks Balthazar to unsink the ship so that he will get an extra fifty thousand souls for his fight against Raphael, in Heaven's civil war," I started, eyes skimming the details on the page. I'd read through the overall outline and I didn't really want to tell them the worst bits that were coming. "Atropos, one of the Fates, takes offence at that and begins to kill the people descended from those who weren't killed when the ship went down in the real world. The thing is…when Balthazar changes history, everything changes."

"What do you mean – everything?" Sam asked me.

"It puts everything onto an alternative destiny line," I said, trying to think of a way to describe it that wasn't going to be using science-fiction terms. I also wasn't sure how they were going to take some of the things that happened. "So…um…Ellen and Jo don't die when you try to take out Lucifer."

I felt Dean's eyes boring into me. "That's a good thing."

I hummed noncommittally.

"Why would Cas need fifty thousand souls?" Dean looked at Bobby.

Bobby glanced at me, deciding he didn't actually need to ask the same question again.

"Well, this is where it's not very well explained but hinted at through the season's stories. Heaven is powered by human souls. The more souls Castiel can tap into, the more power he has for a war," I said, relieved to have gotten past the whole Ellen/Bobby thing, not to mention the Impala/Mustang thing.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Dean look down at the table. "The Alpha," he said, lifting his gaze to his brother. "He was talking about souls. Said that Purgatory held millions of them."

"Crowley would want those," Sam said, following along Dean's thought.

I cleared my throat. "It gets worse."

"Worse?" Bobby asked, his voice cracking a little high. "How much worse?"

I licked my lips and shuffled through the pages until I found the outline for the whole season. "Castiel has made a deal with Crowley, to open Purgatory and divide the souls between Heaven and Hell. The unsinking of the Titanic was – is – an attempt to not have to go through with that, or at least not yet."

The silence at the table was extraordinarily loud and it made my ears ring. I couldn't look at any of them.

"Bull," Dean said suddenly, shaking his head. "No way Cas would be making a deal with Crowley. He'd come to us."

I passed the outline across the table and he took it reluctantly, skimming over the details of each episode. Bobby winced as he looked up and threw the paper back at me.

"Bull-SHIT!" he said, pushing back in his chair and getting up, kicking back with his heel when the chair fell over behind him. "This is Cas!"

He turned to look at Bobby, his expression almost pleading. "You remember the angel who's saved our asses more times than we can count?! The one who-who when we were stuck – really stuck, with no other way out, broke ranks and went to the mat for us?!"

"This isn't the best –" I started to say and he rounded on me.

"Shut it, this-this-this – stuff, you've got, we don't know that it's real, or that it's accurate," he said furiously. "We don't even know if the writers are really seeing our lives."

I nodded. "No. Only you two can verify that."

"Can we take that chance, Dean?" Sam asked, his voice low and reasonable. "If it's like Chuck's visions –"

"Chuck was –" Dean said, stopping suddenly. "How are we supposed to verify if this is like Chuck? We didn't see any of this crappy show."

Bobby sighed. "Therese has seen them. You could go through the last five years with her, see if they hit the high points."

Sam's face brightened and he looked at me. "Do you remember them?" he asked.

I repressed the inappropriate and, given Dean's state of mind, insane urge to laugh. Did I _remember_ them?

"Yeah, I remember them," I told him, fishing around for episodes that wouldn't ignite the powder keg across the table. "In New York state, you met a girl called Sarah. Sarah Blake. She was the daughter of an art dealer and she helped you find a painting that was coming to life and killing people. You thought it was the father in the painting for a while, and realised it was the little girl when you and Sarah were trapped in the house by it, and Dean was at the mausoleum, looking for the remains."

As I spoke, the colour drained out of Sam's face and the look he turned on Dean was complicated, fear and surprise and dread mixed together. Dean's face hardened to stone as he looked from Sam to me. Dean was going to be harder to sell, I thought. He needed a lot of proof.

"Zachariah kept you in 'a beautiful room' while Ruby took Sam to find Lilith's location," I said to him, looking at the table instead of his face. "He offered you beer and burgers and he told you that you couldn't help Sam. You asked Castiel to help you, to get to the convent, to save Sam. And he did, but it was too late. Sam's eyes turned black when he killed Lilith and the cage was broken. He held Ruby while you stabbed her with her own knife."

"You could've got that from Chuck," Dean said, his voice thick and raw.

I resisted the temptation to ask him if I could've gotten that information from a different world. He wasn't thinking straight and there were a million more examples I could give him.

"Before Lucifer escaped, when the convent was filled with a white light, you and Sam were transferred instantly to a plane flying nearby," I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. "And you couldn't get it out of your head that Sam had chosen Ruby over you, until you couldn't look at him any more and when he said he needed to leave, you agreed. That was in a rest area just outside Riverpass, after you'd taken War's ring."

"Fuck!"

I looked up as he swung away from the table. Catching Bobby's eye, I saw his small head-shake. I dropped my gaze back to the notes in front of me. I knew it was too much, to tell a stranger that you know the most intimate details of their life. What else could I have done? What was I supposed to do? The danger from Cas, at least in the outline, was real. Real _here_.

"What else?" Dean said, turning back to the table. "What else do you know about us?"

"Last season ended with Sam holding onto Lucifer and jumping in the cage. You picked up the rings and went to live with Lisa and Ben for a little under a year," I told him reluctantly.

It'd been unbelievable, a plot device retroactively fitted into the story because Sam was gone and they didn't know what to do with Dean, but I had the feeling from the silence that it'd happened here anyway. "Then a djinn targeted you at the house in Cicero and Sam came out of hiding, to save you." I sucked in a deep breath.

"The last episode we shot, that was in the can, was about a ghost whose remains were still living in her sister's body, a kidney transplant, I think. It was revenging itself against the young men who killed it. It possessed the Impala briefly. Ben called you early in the case and you drove all the way back to Battle Creek to talk to Lisa, and found out she was dating someone else. It seemed like that was the end of that relationship."

Dean turned around and walked out of the room, his face white and tense, his back rigid. For a long moment, Bobby, Sam and I just sat there in silence.

"They showed that?" Sam asked eventually, turning to look at me.

"Not really, not whatever was said between them," I said. "Just showed him in the car driving back to you and the case, and his memories of the relationship."

I could feel the questions bouncing around in Sam's head, about what I knew about him, what I'd seen. I didn't know what to say to him.

"What about…everything else?" Bobby asked me quietly. "Eve and the alpha vamp…Crowley?"

"You can poison Eve, kill her," I suddenly remembered, wetting the tip of my finger and flicking fast through the draft scripts until I found it. "The ashes of a phoenix will kill her and Dean and Sam find a reference to a phoenix in Samuel Colt's journal. Colt wrote that there was a phoenix in Sunrise, Wyoming, in 1861 and they go back in time to kill it."

"You're shittin' me?"

"No," I said, looking to the next script. "Dean's supposed to mix the ash in a glass of whiskey and drink it, then she bites him and dies."

"And how do we get back to 1861, exactly?" Sam asked.

"Cas…," I said falteringly. "Cas takes you." I realised I'd just snafu-ed that solution by introducing the angel's betrayal before they'd gotten that far. "Crap."

"That's puttin' it mildly," Bobby remarked.

"The alpha vamp disappears. I don't know what happened to it." I looked down at the outline again. "Crowley has been collaborating with Cas and Samuel to get the alpha monsters to find out the location of Purgatory and how to open it."

"We knew about Crowley and Samuel," Sam said, glancing again to the door. "How'd we find out about Cas?"

"Cas was listening in on your conversations," I said, hurriedly flicking through the scripts to the second-last in the pile. "You tried to find out where Crowley was by torturing demons and got a name, then Crowley sent a bunch of demons –" I shook my head and handed him the draft. "This is going to go quicker if you all read these yourselves. I don't know what happens in between the scenes or in between the episodes, only what the writers write."

I gave Bobby the outline and the five other drafts and skimmed through the rest of the notes I'd taken down and stuffed into the folder, trying not to hear the pounding of my heart in the silence of the room, against my ears, as the two men read.

The last script outline I'd been given, roughly filled in but still missing a few details, was Crowley kidnapping Lisa and Ben. I did not want to be in this room when Dean found out about that.

Sam put down his script and picked up one from Bobby's pile, reading fast, his eyes flashing over the pages. We all looked up as the front door opened and closed, none too gently, and I fidgeted in my chair, Bobby's gaze pinning me there.

"I'm not buying this –" Dean said, not looking at me as he came into the room.

"Sit. Read," Bobby told him, pushing the outline and the first two scripts over to him.

"What's this?" Dean stared at the paper warily.

"Our future," Sam said, looking over his script at his brother. "We can get ahead of it."

"If it's real."

"However they did it, however it happened, they seem to have gotten it pretty right for the last five years," Sam countered tautly. "Just read it."

He glanced sideways at me. "And she didn't write it so quit shooting the messenger."

Dean glared at him, and picked up the outline and I eased my chair back a smidgin. Bobby looked at me warningly.

"I'll, um, just start the dishes," I said, hoping that would be seen to be staying put while at the same time removing me from Dean's eyeline. He hadn't seemed so threatening on the show. At least, not to anyone not a demon.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Like I said, I'm not all that mad keen on housework, and in my own place I ate mostly take-out off serviettes so that I could avoid the issue of washing dishes entirely. But here, I was out of the firing line and with warm, sudsy water up to my elbows and the undemanding repetition of washing, rinsing and stacking, my pulse had slowed and steadied, even when I heard Dean's five minutes of concerted and inventive cursing coming from the other room.

I was almost sorry when the last cup was clean, rinsed and balanced on the drying rack, taking my time with letting the water drain out of the sink and wiping my hands on the towel on the rail beside it, keeping my back to the dining room.

"Look at this way," Sam said, his tone determinedly optimistic. "It's not like with Chuck, where we only got a short lead-time, this time we know everything that's coming."

"Not helping," Dean growled, pushing the papers across the table toward his brother.

There wasn't a lot of dialogue written down in the script where the angel tells his story in his own words. The introduction was there. From Dean's perspective, I thought that the worst bit was where Cas makes a decision to leave him in his normal life, not asking for help and not telling him about Sam, not telling him anything. It was, I realised gradually, more proof that even his closest friends didn't know him well enough to have known that the year he'd spent in Cicero had been the worst kind of torture for him. And that, I thought, was eating him as much as the betrayal of his trust, the difficulties they were facing in getting rid of Eve and shutting Cas and Crowley down.

"What do you want to do?" Bobby asked him, glancing over his shoulder at me.

Dean saw the glance and turned away. "What can we do?" he asked him. "Pretend we don't know this stuff until we get the phoenix ash? Cas is spying on us later, what's to say he's not doing it now?"

"You're right," Sam said suddenly. "We need a room that's completely warded."

"According to that," Dean said, waving a dismissive hand at the pile on the table. "We get some of it wrong anyway."

"Then we gotta be smarter," Bobby said, his voice grating as his patience got thin. "C'mon, think! We need to figure out how to use this stuff!"

"Hey! Dorothy!" Dean turned in the chair and looked at me. "Any ideas on how to turn this crap-fest into a useful weapon?"

I stared back at him, feeling a flush of red rising up my neck and filling my cheeks, every thought blanked out of my brain, his mocking demand ringing in my ears, my nails digging into my palms as I stood as mute as a freakin' table-lamp. Normally I'm not bad with come-backs, even the occasional memorable zinger to mark an attack. This time I felt like I'd forgotten how to use words.

"Didn't think so," he said, after a moment. He turned back to Bobby. "We're fried."

"No. We're not," Sam said in a vehement hiss. "We just found out about this. We'll – we'll get some sleep and we'll ward a room and we'll figure it out, Dean, just like we always do."

Dean gave him a pitying look and got up from the table. He looked around the room, appearing to remember that the sofa was now somewhere else.

"Therese cleaned out the bedrooms upstairs," Bobby said in a tired voice, looking at him. "Grab one for yerself and get some shut-eye. It's been a helluva long day."

I was still standing there, still unable to make my voice work when he walked out of the room and thumped his way up the staircase. Sam looked over at me.

"Sorry," he said, wincing, no doubt at my stunned-and-frozen expression. "He's just…he'll come around."

I walked slowly to the table and began to gather up the scripts, papers and notes, piling them haphazardly into the leather folder.

"He's right," I said, as I closed the folder and looked at Bobby. "You saw the end of the outline."

Bobby nodded. "They open Purgatory."

"If we stop that, if we change…change all of this," Sam said, sweeping a hand above the table. "What happens? Do we all cease to exist? Does your world cease to exist?"

"I don't think so," I said, opening the folder again, my fingers finding the printed changes I'd done in the office. "The ending of the episode you appeared in was different from what happened." I handed him the pages of the scenes. "Up to the point that you came through that window, it was the same, Balthazar and the key, I mean. But the rest…Cas was supposed to find you in another world, take you back, use the key to get into his secret stash of weapons…none of that happened, right?"

"Balthazar did give Cas the key," Sam said slowly.

"Maybe what we're looking at here is some leeway?" Bobby mused, looking at Sam. "Like, we might be following some of the story but there's places we can change, things we do differently so that it doesn't come out the same way or some bits anyway?"

"If Balthazar – on Cas' orders – changes history and the Titanic doesn't sink," Sam said, gesturing at the folder. "And all those other things change, what happens to you?"

I blinked at him. I had no idea. I was here now, but in a world where the Titanic hadn't been sent to the bottom of the ocean? A world where Ellen was married to Bobby and Dean drove a Mustang? Was there going to be room for me in that world?

"I don't know," I said, glancing from him to Bobby. "I might get sent back home?"

"Or you might disappear – completely," Sam said. "We gotta figure a way to stop this from happening at all."

Neither voiced an opinion on how that might be possible.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I couldn't sleep. The room at the end of the hall, the furthest from the others, was quiet and dark, but what had been said at the dining table was churning over and over in my head, refusing to go away, refusing to come clear and I tossed this way and turned that way, finally lying still on my back, staring at the ceiling.

There had to be other ways of doing this, I thought. What I'd said about the scenes that were included in the scripts – in the episodes – and those that were not, was important, I was sure of that. Things the writers hadn't seen, hadn't witnessed or written down. Sam had asked me what had happened to Chuck and I'd been forced to tell him that in the show, he'd finished the last chapter, Dean turning up at Lisa's, and had just vanished. He'd frowned and asked what I'd meant, but there wasn't anything more I could tell him about it. I said the fans were convinced Chuck was God, but the production team hadn't gotten an answer one way or the other.

Rolling onto my stomach, I grabbed the pillow and tucked it under my chin, staring through the window at the night sky. Same stars, I realised slowly. Somehow, that felt wrong, as if there should've been a difference.

I wondered if just doing everything differently to the script would bring about a change in the outcomes. Sam and Dean had tried with Chuck's chapter, I remembered. That hadn't worked out so well. But the writers in my world, they weren't prophets, more like…seers or psychics, tapping into something happening in a parallel universe, than a prophet seeing the outcome of the lines of destiny.

Punching the pillow in frustration, I groaned to myself. Now I was sounding like some stupid TV show writer. I wanted a clear thought. Something to offer them. Something that would work.

Time-travel. It'd been used on the show a couple of times already. Both times instigated by angels. Were there any other angels, other than Cas, who would help them? Balthazar, I thought. Not out of the goodness of his heart, but maybe he could be convinced of what Cas was trying to do and become a –

The thought provoked a faint memory of the second-last script. It'd been loosely titled 'Let It Bleed'. And in it, Dean and Sam had convinced the campy angel that Cas was out of control. Frowning, I turned over and knocked the lamp over in my haste to switch it on. I tried to get out of bed to pick it up and the covers tangled around my feet, sending me head-first to the floor, my elbows thumping on the carpet while my feet remained stubbornly trapped in the sheets on the bed.

The door burst open, the overhead light going on and I looked up at Bobby, Sam and Dean, standing in the doorway, all three scanning for the room for the intruder they thought must've been there.

Kicking the covers free, I finished my collapse to the floor in slow-motion, picking myself up first then the lamp.

"What the hell –?" Dean's gaze circled the room and focussed on the lamp, then me.

"Just fell out of bed," I said, as cheerfully as I could manage, turning to the nightstand and setting the lamp back onto it as heat flooded my face. "Must've been a nightmare."

"About what?" Sam asked.

"I can't remember," I lied, fiddling with the lamp cord and switching it on. "I'm fine, I'm sorry I woke you."

"Uh huh," Bobby grunted and turned away, heading back down the hall.

Sam shook his head and followed him. I didn't hear a third set of footsteps and I risked a glance over my shoulder.

Dean's expression suggested that he thought it'd be safer for everyone if I slept in the panic room. He flipped off the light-switch without making a snarky comment to that effect, however, grabbing the door-handle and pulling the door shut behind him.

Well, that could've gone better, I thought wearily. His expressions were remarkably eloquent and I got that he thought it was a huge mistake that I was here. I also got that I hadn't exactly exhibited any massively redeeming features since my arrival.

Instead, I'd handed them the worst news they'd probably had in a while, a blue-print proving that despite all their past efforts, the world was in danger once again and their one ally couldn't be trusted. I might've been just the messenger but it was already painfully obvious I was going to be forever tainted with that news, just in telling them about it.

They weren't quite as light-hearted as they'd been in the show, I thought to myself. That shouldn't have surprised me. Along with a few other fans, I'd been getting sick of the way the Winchesters had been getting less experienced as hunters for the last couple of seasons thanks to some of the writers handing in scripts without doing their research. In this world, where a mistake didn't mean a re-set and another take but more likely a funeral pyre or at best a trip to a hospital, it made sense that they were more on the ball and less forgiving.

Sinking back down to the floor, a few things occurred to me at the same time. You're gonna think I'm slow – can't be helped, 'cause I felt slow – but it wasn't until then that it really got through that in this world, Dean had really _gone_ to Hell, had been _tortured_ and had tortured others. Sam had _really drunk demon blood_, manipulated by a demon and himself and the devil had really gotten out. The signs of the apocalypse, the earthquakes, the storms, the deaths – here all those things had really, truly happened. I shook my head. When it was the show, it'd been kind of easy to…not brush those things off, so much as forget what impacts they must have had.

All the scars were there, I thought, in a kind of a daze. All of them. Four fine lines along Sam's left cheek, courtesy of the daeva they'd faced, hard to notice at first but there. There would be bullet wounds in their shoulders, Bobby would have a knife scar on his abdomen…x-rays would show multiple breaks and a set of strange markings on their ribs…

In the show, the writers had suggested that Dean's scars had been healed when he was pulled from Hell, and again when Castiel healed him after Lucifer's beating. But those scars were all still there…did that mean that the writers didn't see everything? Or was it just that the production team thought it was a good way to lighten up on the make-up and continuity issues?

All still there.

How many other things might have been fudged then, I wondered? Changed or overlooked because of costs? Or the too-hard factor? I leaned back against the bed. It was possible that there were openings in the outlines I'd brought, things that the show couldn't or wouldn't do because of the production requirements. Things that wouldn't apply here.

_May have been born at night, boy, but it wasn't last night._

Bobby's – actually, Jim Beaver's – voice spoke clearly in my memory. Sam had summoned Balthazar to stop Dean from putting his soul back, I remembered, flipping backwards through the older scripts. If he could do it once, he could do it again.

_Thin_, I thought. _Anorexic, _actually. But it wasn't out of the ballpark.

Before the phoenix could be tackled, something had to be done about the Titanic. Maybe two birds could be killed with one stone, I considered, getting up and picking up the leather folder that had precipitated my dive to the floor and settling myself back on the bed, leaning up against the pillows as I opened it.

I looked back for the details of the production team's summoning spell. Hopefully Sam would have the full details because the notes I had were even thinner than my idea. It wasn't going to be easy to get Balthazar to go covertly behind Cas' back – both in the matter of the Titanic, and in transporting the Winchesters back to 1861 for the phoenix. But in the last of the outlines I had, Balthazar does help them when he realises what Cas is trying to do.

I fished out the pen from the sleeve on the inner cover of the folder, found a clean sheet of paper and started writing. If it succeeded, I thought, the scratching of the pen loud in the silent room, it would change everything…

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

* * *

At five-thirty in the morning, the kitchen was clean, quiet and peaceful, a pale dawn light filtering through the café curtains at the windows, the room smelling deliciously of freshly brewed coffee, and I sat at the small table, staring absently at the lists of numbers and organisations and job titles under the row of wall phones, feeling unaccountably relaxed, despite getting practically no sleep at all.

That feeling lasted all of fifteen minutes, then there was a distinctive scrape in the hall and Dean walked into the dining room.

From the extremely fast glance I got before realising who it was, he hadn't slept much better than I had. I'd like to be able to say that I threw out a casual, yet sharply funny one-liner at him, or some pithy, scathing remark that would have set the scales straight but unfortunately I can't. I seemed to have lost that ability completely and I sat in uncomfortable silence, my eyes glued to the wall under the phones now as he walked past me to the coffee pot, listening to the sounds of a cup being taken down, filled and the clunk of the pot put back on the burner.

For a few minutes, the kitchen was absolutely silent bar the soft hissing of the pot. Then there footsteps. I picked up my cup and stared down into it as if it held all the secrets of the universe, hoping the footsteps would keep going and I'd have the room back to myself again.

No such luck.

The chair opposite was pulled out, and there was another clunk as a cup hit the table.

"You sleep okay?" Dean asked, his voice quieter than I think I'd ever heard it.

"Fine," I muttered into the depths of the cup.

"Good…uh…um…good," he said and fell silent.

In the movies, or even on TV, awkwardness disappears after a few minutes, just lasting long enough to make the audience squirm, you know. In real life it goes on forever. And it sucks the oxygen right out of the air as it hangs around, heavy, suffocating, causing pins and needles because you can't move an inch and the position you found yourself frozen in was not all that comfortable to start off with.

"I guess…I…uh," he said after an eternity of that oxygen-sucking awkwardness. "You know…I…"

Since I couldn't even guess at what might have been the purpose of stringing that particular collection of words together, I remained silent, staring into the near-black liquid that barely covered the bottom of the cup.

"Uh…I'm…," he continued after a few more moments of air-removing discomfort. "I guess I…wasn't…you know…"

This, I suddenly realised with a burst of horrified clarity that shocked me into looking up, was an attempt at an apology. He was staring at the table top intensely, maybe hoping it would catch fire and save us both the ignominy of strangulation, the light from the window half-shadowing his face, his knuckles white around the handle of the cup in front of him.

"Right," I said, finding my voice and at least one word in the oxygen-less room. "Yep," I added, inanely pleased to have been able find another.

I got up hurriedly, taking my cup to the sink before he could attempt any more. An apology was worse than the rage, I found to my surprise. At first, I couldn't think why, then I realised that six years of watching Dean dance around apologies, stutter and become inarticulate to an extreme degree, had created an aversion to seeing him attempt any more.

He cleared his throat and I nodded frantically, dropping my cup in the sink and spinning around. He was frowning, his gaze dropping back to the table the second I'd turned.

"Well, I'd better –"

"I just…"

"You two are up early," Sam said, coming into the dining room, t-shirt on inside-out and hair sticking out to the side.

"Sam!"

Yeah, that was my over-the-top response. It burst out of me in a pitch much higher than my usual speaking voice and was so filled with relief and…well, more relief, that it sounded a bit like I'd just seen the messiah.

"Coffee?" I asked, not waiting for an answer, turning back to the counter and grabbing another cup and filling it.

Honestly, I don't know what possessed me. I'd thought, back in the real world, that I knew these two guys pretty well, pretty damned well actually. But being really here, it was all different. Sure, it didn't help that I'd turned up bearing bad news, having no place to go but in their pockets, no means of supporting myself, especially in Sioux Falls, but still I'd thought I'd be…I don't know…cooler? About it all?

I put the cup in front of the taller of the Winchesters, and hovered at the end of the table.

"I thought of something," I blurted out as Sam took a sip of the hot coffee. "Balthazar."

Dean leaned back in his chair, his expression morphing from discomfort to a bitter-looking smirk.

"What about him?"

"You summoned Balthazar," I said, looking at Sam. "Not long ago, right?"

He grimaced a little, keeping his eyes on his cup. I didn't want to bring up memories of his being soulless and all that, but it couldn't be helped.

"Mmmm," he murmured noncommittally into his cup.

"Well, I'm pretty sure that even though he's Cas' friend, he won't let Cas open Purgatory."

"Pretty sure?" Sam looked up at me doubtfully.

"It's in the scripts, you…um…summon him for something else," I hedged around the exact details of that. "And he confronts Cas himself."

"Huh," Dean said, swallowing the rest of his coffee as he looked at his brother.

Sam bent his head and I saw him remembering the outline, his mouth tightening a little as he realised why I'd been circumspect about the details.

"In any case, if you summon him here now, explain what Cas is doing, he might help – with the Titanic and with getting you to the past to the kill the phoenix."

"Might."

I felt my shoulders slump as I heard my sparkling plan gain some weight of reality. "Well, nothing's a sure thing, is it?"

"No," Sam said, shooting a measured look at his brother. "It might work and it's the only plan anyone's come up with."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The big shed wasn't far from the house, and had once been a barn. Sam finished the circle and took the bowl of ingredients from Dean, setting it in the circle and lighting a match. He tossed it in and the ground-up powder of herbs and crystals and bone burst into flame.

The angel, tall and thin, appeared on other side of the circle. "Do I look like a man-servant to you? No?" He looked from one to the other. "No? Then quit _ringing_ for me, please."

"This is important, Balthazar," Dean said, his stare impassive.

Balthazar shook his head at him. "I was drinking '75 Dom out of a soprano's navel when you called. _That_ was important."

He seemed to resign himself to the fact that he was no longer doing that, and put down the bottle he was holding, looking from Dean to Sam, then past him to Bobby. His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch as he caught sight of me.

"Still here? You must have a very wide masochistic streak."

"Crowley's alive," Sam said bluntly. "And he and Cas have made a deal."

The angel laughed. "Angels don't make deals."

"Yeah, well, Cas did," Dean said bitterly. "Half-and-half in the souls of Purgatory."

He got him with that and we could all see it. Balthazar's face twitched, as he registered the implications, smoothing out again into an expression of polite enquiry.

"Yes, he mentioned that," he said, his gaze just shifting past Dean. "So?"

"So, we need your help to stop him," Sam said tightly. "Starting with the Titanic."

"The Titanic? Horrible film," Balthazar said, shuddering slightly. "Really what passes for entertainment these days –"

"You stop it from sinking to get extra souls for Cas' war effort," Bobby cut him off sharply. "And it's gonna cause all manner of crap when you do."

"Where are you getting your information?" The angel looked at him curiously. Bobby didn't miss the narrowing of Balthazar's attention on him.

"We got our sources," Dean said. "You can't save that ship."

"To put those teeny-tiny hardworking minds at rest, I haven't the slightest intention of saving the Titanic," he said, with a flourishing hand wave. "Despite the fact that if I did, I would be spared the agony of having to listen to that damned song –"

"Cas will ask you to do it," Bobby growled at him. "You gotta come up with a reason not to."

"And we need an angel-assisted ride," Dean added, leaning up against the wall. "To 1861."

"Oh, so now I'm being asked to join the Hardy Boys?" Balthazar asked him archly. "I don't think so. What, exactly, is in this for me?"

There was nothing that Bobby, Sam or Dean could offer the angel, I knew. Nothing they had that he wanted. Angels don't make deals, I thought with an internal sniff. Like heck they don't. They just didn't usually because no one had anything to offer them.

"If Cas and Crowley open Purgatory, a lot worse will come out than just the souls of the monsters," I blurted out involuntarily.

Four pairs of eyes turned to me.

The reference to Season 7 had been scribbled on the back of an envelope in my folder and shoved into one of the pockets. The whole point, the show-runner had told us all at a meeting at the beginning of Season 6, of the dangers of opening Purgatory was going to kick-start the next season, and that was why the story had been geared toward allowing it to happen.

"I was going to tell you," I mumbled at the floor. "I thought it might be redundant if we could stop Purgatory from opening."

"Who are you again?" Balthazar asked me, taking a step closer.

"No one," Dean snapped. "What happens when he opens the doorway to Purgatory?"

"He would have to take control of the souls," Balthazar said, the words coming out slowly. "Subsume them, into himself."

"And?" Sam asked.

"And there's a fifty-fifty chance that it would destroy his vessel and possibly half of the planet we're standing on."

"Great odds," Bobby grumbled. "You gonna help?"

"Put my neck on the chopping block on your say-so?" The angel scoffed at him, but his reservations were still visible in the way his eyes slid away.

"Cas had gone darkside and you know it," Dean told him, his voice low and harsh. "I thought he was your friend."

"I thought so too," Balthazar said. He vanished, and the space where he'd been made a whooshing sound as the air rushed in to fill it.

"Sonofabitch!"

Sam ignored that and looked at Bobby. "Think he'll help?"

Bobby shrugged. "Fifty-fifty."

Dean looked at me. "What's coming out of Purgatory when Cas opens the door?"

Bobby and Sam turned around to look at me as well.

"We had a meeting about the storyline at the beginning of this season," I said, thrusting my hands into the pockets of my jacket as the need to fidget started to get overwhelming. "Sera said she wanted a season that built up to a new threat for the next one, and that the cliff-hanger would be Cas succeeding in opening Purgatory. She said that Purgatory would also contain monsters that couldn't be killed at all, from the bible."

"What kind of monsters?" Sam asked me, his brow furrowing up.

"Leviathan, she said."

"What?" Bobby said, pushing his hand under the edge of his cap.

"Look, in my world, none of this works the way it does here," I said, waving my hand helplessly at him. "Purgatory is a way-station to either Heaven or Hell, in the Christian mythology, Leviathan was the first beast God made but it doesn't say what happened to it…this stuff, this lore that is in this world, it's not the same."

"We better hit the books." Bobby looked from me to Sam, then Dean. "Figure out what the hell this means."

Dean's face was stony. "You got anymore information we should know about in that folder of –"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I woke up suddenly, disoriented and alone and stark naked in a big bed, sunshine flooding into the room through a big picture window and the sound of running water somewhere close. Looking around, I realised that I didn't recognise the place at all.

A burst of whistling, some kind of tune, came from the closed door to one side of the room, and that galvanised me into action, tugging at the sheet and swinging my feet over the edge. I wrapped the sheet around me and stood up.

It was a bedroom, small, the bed taking up most of the space, a built-in along the opposite wall and a couple of night-stands to either side. On one there was a photo frame and I leaned toward it, mouth dropping open as I stared at the two people in the photo, just as a voice came through what I presumed was the bathroom door.

"Hey, could you grab me a clean towel?"

Sam's voice. Sam in the photo. Arm wrapped around my shoulder. Both of us smiling broadly at the camera.

_Impossible_.

"Terry?"

I stood next to the bed, staring around the room, then crossed to the built-in and pulled back on the sliding doors, almost losing the sheet at the same time.

_Clothing_.

On the left, Sam's, by the look of the sizes. On the right, mine, I guessed, peering at the mix of shirts, blouses, skirts, dresses and pants.

Oh _god_.

Oh _my_ god.

"Ter? Clean towel?" The bathroom door opened and steam poured out past the tall man standing there. "Hey, you okay?"

He started out, dripping water over the carpet and I realised that in another moment I was going to get a much more intimate picture of Sam Winchester than I really wanted.

"Yep, cloud-gathering. Fine. Ah, a bit tired. What did you want?" I babbled at him, turning around and fixing my attention on the folds of sheet that were gathered up in front of me.

"A towel," he said, spotting one on the shelves in the built-in. "You sure you're okay?"

I sneaked a look and let out my breath as I saw the towel go around his hips. "Yeah, um…"

There wasn't anything I could say to explain how it felt to be in the middle of a conversation with him, Bobby and his brother in Bobby's shed one minute, which I remembered distinctly, and then wake up in a small apartment that I was apparently sharing with him, the next.

_Balthazar_.

I don't know why it took so long to figure that out, but I'm gonna blame the shock for now. The angel had saved the boat. There wasn't another explanation.

It didn't explain how Sam seemed comfortable getting dressed in front of me, clearly without a memory of what'd happened, and how I did remember the switch. Because I wasn't from here, I wondered?

I opened the bedroom door and walked into a slightly larger living room, big glass doors opening onto a small balcony on one side, another door on the other side of the room, possibly a kitchen.

There was a knock at the third door I could see, set smack into the middle of the interior wall and I hitched my sheet up and went over to it.

Dean stood there, a slow, knowing smirk lifting one cheek higher than the other.

"Morning, sunshine," he drawled, walking into the room past me. "Do I want to know why you were still in bed?"

"Balthazar unsank the Titanic," I muttered, not exactly to him.

"What?"

"He's changed everything," I added, swinging around to look at the room more closely, ignoring Sam's brother.

As living rooms go, it was fairly ordinary. There were a number of bookshelves along one wall, filled with books that I suspected were not on the Times best-seller list, and a couple of large, framed prints hanging in between them. An impressionist painting by Monet, a rather nice Turner seascape and a blocky Moulin Rouge poster in three colour screen. A very long sofa – for overnight guests, I wondered at the back of my mind – and two big, overstuffed armchairs provided seating, surrounding a low table and facing a low cabinet with a TV and entertainment appliances covering the top.

I walked over to the glass sliding doors and opened one, a fresh salty-smelling breeze pouring in and billowing up the sheer fabric curtains to either side. The balcony was tiny, with a fake wrought-iron balustrade surrounding it. It overlooked several streets, and more distantly, a wooded shoreline and the glint of blue water.

"Where are we?"

"What?" Dean asked again, a faint note of alarm in his voice this time.

"Hey."

I was vaguely aware that the bedroom door had opened and closed.

"Hey," Dean said. "What's wrong with Terry?"

I turned around. "Nothing's wrong with me," I told him, feverishly trying to think of some way to explain to them what'd happened. "Balthazar wasn't supposed to save the ship, we're in a different timeline now, it's all changed – including this," I said, waving my arm around the room. "Sam and I are not together, that's…it's…ridiculous."

Sam's expression twitched and Dean shot a look at him. "I don't think she meant –"

"I did mean it," I cut in, taking a step forward and having to stop as the sheet snagged on something behind me. I twisted around, yanking at it. "And I'm not trying to be mean, Sam, for some reason you two remember this timeline instead of the real one," I continued, getting a bit louder as the sheet refused to budge. I pulled hard and it ripped, and I gathered the back of it up in a hurry, looking back at them. "Is Ellen married to Bobby?"

"Four years now," Sam said, frowning at me. "You know that."

"I didn't know how long, actually," I said. "Look, this isn't real, this isn't the right timeline for our lives – your lives – anyone's lives."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Dean asked me, stepping back as I swept past him and the bulk of the sheet behind me took the vase and papers from the low table on the way.

_God!_ How was I going to prove any of this to them? The past, their past, had been wiped out with a new life. The _folder_. The folder had _proof_.

I turned for the bedroom, and nearly ran back in there, slamming the door behind me. From outside, I could barely hear their voices, rumbling through the wood.

"Be just a sec!" I yelled out, dropping the sheet on the floor and searching through the drawers of the closet, throwing underwear and a shirt and a pair of jeans onto the bed as I looked for the folder.

It was there, wrapped in long shawl and tucked at the back of the bottom drawer. I pulled it out and unwrapped it, flipping it open as I snagged the panties and dragged them on.

None of it made sense.

I was halfway through fastening the pale pink bra, when I realised that none of the draft scripts I was looking at matched up with the ones I'd brought to this world with me. Werewolves and the Loch Ness monster, a transdimensional doorway to another universe, these weren't the story ideas.

New timeline, new life, new scripts.

"Balthazar!"

It was a forlorn hope that the angel might answer but I didn't have anything left to try.

"Balthazar!" I hissed a second time.

A quiet rustle of wings made me swing around to see the lanky angel leaning up against the bathroom door-frame.

"You _are_ different, aren't you?" he said, smirking a little. "You remember."

"Yeah, I do," I said, keeping my voice low. "You said you weren't going to sink the ship!"

"Change in plan," he told me, shrugging in a lack of interest. "Cas insisted."

"Atropos is killing off all the descendents," I said. "That's bringing the hunters in."

"Well, tell them not to try and kill her," he said, a little alarmed. "Clothos and Lachesis wouldn't like it and you really don't want them on your tail."

"I don't want any of this!" I said to him in frustration. "Can't you resink it?"

"I could, I suppose, but I won't," he smiled. "I asked Cas about Purgatory. He said he wasn't considering it."

"You didn't believe him."

"No," he admitted unwillingly. "But I can't go into open warfare just yet."

"Rachel knows," I said, remembering Cas' confrontation with her. "Or she's suspicious. There must be others –"

"Terry!" Sam called from outside the room, knocking at the door.

"Just be a minute," I trilled back at him, wincing at the high pitch. "You've got to stop this."

He looked at the rumpled bed. "Such a hardship, is it?"

"It's not real!"

Laughing, he shook his head at me. "If nothing else, my dear, this ought to have convinced that nothing is real."

He disappeared with that disconcerting pop and I turned around, walking to the door and unlocking it.

"Hey, uh, you ready to go?"

"Go where?"

"Bunch of people dying weird deaths over in Pennsylvania," Dean said, waving a hand at the door. "Daylight's wastin', we gotta get on the road."

"We?"

It came out as a squeak and Sam grinned, stepping forward and sweeping an arm around me till I was squashed against him.

"I know what I promised after the last time," he said reassuringly. "Don't worry, new rules apply."

"What?"

"What?" Dean growled at the same time. "This isn't turning into one of those soppy chick-flick road-trips, Sammy."

Sam ignored him and let me go. "Grab a bag, we'll be about a week."

"Maybe you could drop me at Bobby's –?" I thought hard about the possible options.

"Drop you off…?" Dean's nose wrinkled up. "An extra three hundred miles outta our way?"

"Besides, Bobby's still taking Rufus' death pretty hard, he and Ellen need some time alone," Sam added. "Grab a bag."

Turning around, I walked back into the bedroom and hunted around for a bag. There were several at the bottom of the closet, army duffles one of which had my name stencilled on the side. Fabulous, I thought. This was obviously a regular thing. A regular thing which I knew nothing of that was going to bring me down in some totally foreseeable way, like not knowing the routine when they blasted the crap out of something. I was in trouble. So much trouble.

I threw in a weeks' worth of clothing and the folder and zipped it shut, picking it up and following Sam as he lifted his gear bag onto his shoulder. Baltimore, I thought belatedly, as we came out of the block of small apartments onto the street and I recognised the general vicinity. No, Sioux Falls wasn't really on the way to Pennsylvania from here.

I sighed as Dean unlocked the '67 Shelby Mustang and tilted the seat forward so that I could climb into the back seat. Not even the Impala. I know you can't have everything but sheesh, just a few of the little things, right? The Impala is wide and comfy. The Mustang, although only three inches narrower in width, just didn't have the same feel to it. It did, however, have a lot under the hood.

"You wanna clarify some of the stuff you said back there?" Dean asked, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror.

"Not really," I muttered into my chest, ducking his view. It wasn't just the weirdness of living a whole new life. _Everything_ was weird. Sam's fond looks over the back of the seat. Dean's lack of mistrust and abrasive comments. I hate to tell you this, but I almost wished he'd go back to calling me Dorothy.

"Uh…would you believe me if I told you that an angel changed destiny and now we're all living completely different lives to the ones we were living yesterday?"

The brothers exchanged a look, then Sam turned around, his face filled with a disturbing mix of understanding and compassion and pride.

"Is it the hormones, honey?" he asked solicitously, and I tell ya, I nearly died right on the spot.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

* * *

"Uh…hormones?" I asked weakly.

"Well," Sam said, waving a hand around. "The doc did say that it might, you know, affect some things."

"Pull over."

"What? Why?" Dean said, clearly unwilling to stop now that he was moving.

"I'm gunna throw up!" I snapped at him.

The Mustang swerved to the side of the road and Sam clambered out, tipping the seat forward to let me out. I heard Dean's voice rising as I stumbled away from the car.

"I thought you said this part was over!"

I hadn't had anything to eat so virtually nothing came out and after a minute the shuddering went away. I spat into the grass, feeling about as idiotic as it was possible to feel. Just shock, I told myself. Nothing to feel bad about. It wasn't just shock, of course, but hey, you tell yourself what you have to.

"You okay?" Sam called out worriedly and I pulled in a breath, waving my hand in the air behind me to indicate that I was fine, and looking at the line of traffic coming out of the city.

Turning around, I walked slowly back to the car. Knocked up, I thought, really and truly, in this timeline anyway, knocked up. I have to say, and you may think badly of me for even thinking it, that it seemed incredibly unfair to not have even had the experience of having sex with the tall man hovering anxiously beside the car to make up for the consequences.

"You done hurling chunks?" Dean asked as I climbed back into the car.

"I didn't hurl anything," I said, leaning back against the seat. "That was the problem."

"What?"

"No breakfast."

"We'll stop and get you something to eat?" Sam said soothingly as he got back in and pulled the door closed.

"What?!" Dean looked at him, then twisted around in the seat to glare at me. "It's an hour and a half's drive, you can wait, can't you?"

"It'll be the slowest trip you ever had if I can't get something in my stomach before we get going," I told him. That was the real me, the old me, getting car-sick if my stomach was achingly empty. Apparently being knocked up only made it worse.

"There's that place before Cedonia," Sam said quickly, glancing back at me. "They do an all-day breakfast and we can fill up there."

"This is not turning into some kind of – of –"

"It's not," Sam told Dean and I leaned back against the seat, wondering what I could possibly do to get us back to where we were supposed to be – where they were supposed to be – I didn't even know where I was supposed to be.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Chester, Pennsylvania is an old town by the Delaware River, more renowned for being the original stomping ground of Bill Haley and the Comets, than anything else, although I guess, that depends on who you talk to.

"What's the story?" Sam asked as Dean negotiated the freeway.

"Three people got kicked off in the last week, all freaky. Last guy got karate-chopped by his garage door. And these are all blood relatives," Dean told him, turning onto a street of narrow, sidewall houses.

"And you're thinking…family curse?"

"Could be."

"It's not a family curse," I said, leaning forward between them. "At least, not just one family," I added, thinking of how to short-circuit the investigative process and at least get them to a point where they might be ready to think about angels and…Fates.

"What?" Dean looked over his shoulder at me then hit the brakes when a woman dragging a small dog stepped into the road in front of him. The Mustang's nose dipped sharply and the woman glared at him, the dog yapping furiously as she crossed in front of us. Judging from the paling of Sam's face, I wasn't the only one who'd had a minor attack at that moment, life intruding annoyingly into our mystical quest. Some people, apparently, were just getting on with their lives, oblivious to the fact that they weren't supposed to be living those lives either.

"The Russos aren't the only family affected," I told Dean, hearing the weariness in my voice with an inward wince. "I told you, Balthazar saved the Titanic and these are the people descended from the families who came out here on that ship."

"What's a friggin' ship got to do with someone dying in their garage?"

"So, who's killing them?" Sam ignored his brother's comment and looked back at me.

I thought about Balthazar's warning. There wasn't any way to avoid the Fate, and from what I remembered of the draft, she was pissed at the boys anyway.

"Atropos," I said, hoping that I wasn't – once again – going to make things worse by having the advance information.

"Atro-who?" Dean blurted out, making a left toward the downtown area.

"The Fate?" Sam asked at the same time. "The three sisters?"

"Yeah," I answered, happy I didn't need to go into that, anyway.

Dean slowed down for the lights and looked at Sam. "Why's this chick ganking these families?"

Sam shook his head. "How far are we from the vic's house?"

"Five minutes."

We got there in three, with only a little tire-squealing around the corners. Dean pulled up at the house where the yellow crime tape was still fluttering from the sides of the garage and we got out, walking warily under the half-open garage door.

Dean looked at the EMF meter in his hand. "Not a bleep."

"Well, not a vengeful spirit, then," Sam said, his flashlight beam swinging around the walls and floor. "Huh."

He bent down and picked up a golden thread, looking at me.

"What is that, Christmas tinsel?" Dean asked before I could say anything, looking at the flash of gold in his brother's hand.

"I don't know," Sam said slowly, looking around then walking to a bench with a terracotta pot on it. Rubbing the thread over the side, it left a shimmering golden smear. "It's gold."

"You mean, like, _gold_ gold?"

"Why would a handyman have gold just lying around in his garage?"

"He didn't," I snapped, walking between them. "He was minding his own business, trying to fix that thing," I waved a hand at a bent metal rod lying on the bench. "And Atropos moved his beer."

"What?" Dean looked me as if I was finally losing my marbles. I ignored him and turned around.

"He had a bottle of beer sitting here." I looked at the ring left by the bottle, still visible on the bench's surface. "She moved it, and when he picked it up, he knocked over a jar of nails that was here."

Sam looked at the floor, his flashlight picking up the tiny gleams from the glass specks, a nail half-hidden in the shadow of the bench.

"He took a broom to sweep up the mess, and knocked over the skateboard," I kept going doggedly, feeling my face scrunch up as I tried to remember the exact wording in the script. It was a total knock-on scene, where every single action had caused something else to happen, in a particular chain. "He stepped back onto the skateboard and almost fell onto the shears," I said, pointing to the sharp points of the pruning shears protruding from a pot on another shelf. "When he stopped himself, he knocked over that bucket and sent the golf balls all over the floor. He slipped on them and landed on his back, there." I pointed to the chalked outline on the floor. "Then one of the golf balls rolled onto a mouse-trap."

The mouse-trap was still there, sprung. I couldn't see the offending golf ball but it was somewhere still in there.

"What are you, Sherlock Holmes all of a sudden?" Dean stare shifted from the mouse-trap to me.

"No." I waved at the garage door. "The door was propped up with a plank," I said, and the plank was still lying there, just outside. "And the golf ball hit the plank, knocking it from under the door."

"And the door dropped and decapitated him," Sam finished, looking around the garage. "Because Atropos wanted to kill him."

"Right." I said, looking at him with a little flutter of hope.

"Because Balthazar stopped a ship from sinking," he continued, looking from me to Dean.

"Right!" The hope was more than a flutter now.

"You got all that…from this?" Dean looked around the garage disbelievingly.

"No," I told him, my patience just about gone. It always looks so easy on a show or movie to convince the heroes that someone's from the future or the past, or a different world and that the information they have has to be acted on immediately. Even in the scripts from the show, Dean and Sam would 'get' what Cas was trying to tell them or show them straight away, no matter how preposterous it was. It wasn't like that in real life.

Maybe I didn't have a convincing-enough expression, maybe it was just because it was real freakin' life, but I was getting tired of being pregnant and tired of not being believed.

"I got it from the script of a TV show in another world, a world that I used to live in and which you and Sam were thrown into for a while, before Raphael pulled me back here along with you."

Their faces held identical expressions of confusion.

"Look, call Ellen," I said, remembering that Jo had been tracking similar deaths. "Tell her you found a gold thread."

Dean cocked a brow at me, sliding another look at his brother. "Yeah, well, calling Ellen's an idea, anyway."

He pulled out his phone and ducked under the garage door, giving it a leery look as he went.

"You okay?" Sam asked me and I sighed…deeply.

"Sam, you've got to believe me about this," I said, looking into his worried and concerned eyes. "It's Balthazar. I don't know how to prove it to you, but we've got to summon him, make him undo what he's done. This," I waved a hand around the garage. "This isn't where we're supposed to be."

And the angel had thought that the Fate just might kill them, I suddenly realised. I didn't think he'd had that much ill-feeling toward them, but maybe I'd been wrong.

"Come on, we'll get a room, figure this out," Sam said, looking at the garage door, the rumble of his brother's voice outside. "I never even heard of a ship called the Titanic."

Following him out, I nodded. "No one has."

Dean finished the call as we ducked under the door and came into the sunshine.

"Ellen said Jo's tracking deaths across the West Coast, same deal," he said shortly, looking at me, his expression perplexed. "She's got Bobby working on it."

I realised uncomfortably that it really said a lot for the supposed-relationship I was in with Sam that he wasn't looking at me with suspicion.

"So…" he said, turning to look at Sam. "What now?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The motel room was weird-looking. Weirder-looking than the dinky sets from the show, I mean. It was all black and white. I felt like I should be wearing a slinky evening gown and smoking a cigarette in a long holder while leaning on a piano. Maybe it was just the pregnancy thing. I'd been having a lot of weird thoughts lately.

"Alright, the RMS Titanic was the largest passenger steamship in the world when it made its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic in 1912," Sam said, reading the details from the web site he'd found.

"So what's the big friggin' deal? It's a ship. It sailed," Dean said, opening a beer and dropping onto the sofa.

"It wasn't supposed to sail," I said, walking behind Sam. "It was supposed to hit an iceberg and sink, with most of the passengers and crew lost."

"Um...oh, looks like there was a close call. Ship almost hit an iceberg," Sam said, frowning as he looked at Dean, then twisted around to look at me. "How'd you know that?"

I repressed the overwhelming urge to roll my eyes. "What happened?"

Sam looked back at the page and read on. "Uh, looks like the first mate spotted it just in time."

"Good for him," Dean remarked, leaning back.

"Not good for him," I said in exasperation. "Sam, what was the first mate's name?"

"Mr I. P. Freeley," Sam said, his mouth twisting up as he looked at Dean.

Dean straightened up, paying attention for the first time since we'd gotten into the room. "Well, that's not suspicious. You got a picture of old Freeley?"

"Oh, you got to be kidding me," Sam said, zooming in on the picture on the screen.

"What?"

Dean got up and walked around behind him, looking over his shoulder. I stepped back and closed my eyes in relief. The picture was unmistakably Balthazar.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The table was small and round, and it made drawing the circle easy. Sam closed the curtains as Dean pulled several small pouches of powder from his bag and tipped them into a bowl on the table. He lit four candles and dropped the match into the bowl.

The lights flickered.

"Boys, boys, boys…and girl. Whatever can I do for you?" Balthazar said cheerily, leaning against the divider that separated the room from the kitchen facilities.

"We need to talk," Dean growled at him. Sam moved around to the other side of the table.

Balthazar's gaze settled on me for a moment, and I stared back at him. He gave an almost unnoticeable shrug and looked back at Dean.

"Oh, you seem upset, Dean."

"The hell with the boat, Balthazar?"

"What boat?" the angel said with an attempt at innocence that wouldn't have flown even if he _had_ been innocent. He just had one of those faces.

"The Titanic," I reminded him pointedly.

"Oh. Yeah. The Titanic. Yes, well, uh, it was meant to sink, and I saved it," he said, smiling at Dean.

"What?" Sam looked at me, his forehead all wrinkled up.

"Well it was meant to bash into this iceberg thing and plunge into the briny deep with all this hoopla, and I saved it," Balthazar said, his tone matter-of-fact. "Anything else I can answer for you?"

"Why?"

"Why what?" The angel raised his brows.

"Why did you un-sink the ship?" Dean asked, his voice deeper, a sure sign that he was losing his patience.

"Oh, because I hated the movie," Balthazar said breezily.

"What movie?"

"Exactly!" he exclaimed with a delighted giggle.

"Tell them the truth," I said. "Tell them about Cas."

"What about Cas?" Dean looked from me to Balthazar as the angel's expression changed to a scowl.

"Cas had nothing to with it," Balthazar said, staring at me. "He's busy with the civil war in Heaven."

"The civil war that needs more souls," I said, feeling a bit more confident now that we were back somewhere near the scripts.

"I didn't think that was possible. I thought you couldn't change history," Sam said, inadvertently derailing my masterful interrogation. Balthazar smiled at me, then looked at Sam.

"Oh, haven't you noticed? There's no more rules, boys."

"Wow. The nerve on you. So you just, what, un-sunk a giant boat?" Dean asked, folding his arms over his chest as he stared at the angel. I wanted to interrupt, to keep on at Balthazar about Cas and the souls and the fact that his friend was edging closer and closer to the dark side, but I couldn't get a word in.

"Oh come on. I saved people. I thought you loved that kind of thing," Balthazar said, waving a hand in a broad gesture around the room. "You still averted the Apocalypse, and there are still Archangels. It's just the small details that are different…like you don't drive an Impala," he continued, watching them.

Sam looked at Dean. Dean was frowning at Balthazar.

"Yes, yes. '_What's an Impala?_' Trust me, it's not important. And, of course, Ellen and Jo are alive," he added, turning around and picking up Dean's bottle of whiskey and pouring himself a drink.

He'd dropped that bombshell perfectly, I had to admit it. I couldn't think of a way out of what was going to follow.

"Ellen and Jo?" Dean asked, looking around at Sam. "What?"

"Yes, they're supposed to be dead," Balthazar said, pausing just long enough to let it sink in. "You see, I save a boat, one thing leads to another, which leads to another thousand things, and yada, yada, yada. To cut a long story short, they don't die in a massive explosion." He tipped the glass up. "Mmm. Anyway, let's agree I did a good thing. One less Billy Zane movie and I saved two of your closest friends."

"But now somebody is killing the descendants of the survivors," Sam said. I could see that he was trying to put all these pieces together – what I'd said, what the angel had said, what was actually going on – but it really wasn't all that helpful. He was such one-track guy about this stuff.

"And?"

"And what the hell do you mean Ellen and Jo don't die in a massive explosion?" Dean asked him belligerently.

"They didn't die in the explosion," I butted in. "At least, Jo…didn't…"

I really need some kind of leash for my mouth. Or brain. Or both. I don't know what possessed me at that moment to keep that topic going but from the look on Dean's face, I realised instantly that it was the worst idea I'd had for…probably forever.

"What do you know about it?" he snapped, turning the slowly-growing anger he'd been directing at the angel onto me.

"I told you," I said, wishing that a hole would appear in the floor under my feet and just let me drop into it. "This isn't our timeline. This isn't the right life. Ellen and Jo died in Carthage, when you and Sam tried to kill Lucifer."

Balthazar laughed. "Tell them about the hellhounds, why don't you?"

I looked at him furiously. "Tell them about Cas and why he asked you to un-sink the Titanic!"

"I haven't the foggiest idea of what you're talking about," he said cheerfully, his wide, shit-eating grin not making it to his eyes.

"Tell them why Atropos is killing all these people and looking for them too – or is that part of your mop-up plan?"

"Atro-who?" Balthazar said, looking at his wrist as if he was wearing a watch. "It's been fun, really, it has…but I've a terribly schedule today, so _au revoir_!"

I reached out for him, and felt Sam's hand close around my arm just as the angel vanished, a popping sound louder than the soft rustle of flapping wings leaving an echo in my ears.

"Whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, _wait_. Son of a bitch!" Dean barked at the empty space in front of him.

"Damn it!"

Dean and Sam both turned to look at me.

"Okay," Sam said slowly. "From the top."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"So, in the timeline we're supposed to be in…where the Titanic sinks," Sam said, looking at his hands, clasped together in his lap. "Ellen and Jo die, and…uh…Bobby's alone…and…um…we don't…uh…we're not…there's no…"

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I couldn't have sugar-coated that bit for him, and it couldn't help to tell him that when he got back to the right timeline he wouldn't be feeling what he was feeling. I sure didn't want to make the situation worse by trying to comfort him, although I had a feeling that at least one of the brothers was expecting to me to do just that.

Dean was looking at his brother, his expression drawn. I wasn't surprised, exactly, along with millions of viewers, I'd seen Dean look like that before, hurting on behalf of his brother. It just seemed too familiar for the unfamiliar men who weren't really like the characters. Except, I thought, maybe in the important things, they were.

"Doesn't sound like we got any good reasons to convince Balthazar not to sink the boat," Dean said, his voice holding a bitter edge as he looked back at me.

I bit my lip at the intentional rebuke in his eyes. "Atropos is setting the scales right," I said. "She'll kill all the descendants of the people who lived instead of dying, and then she'll come after you two."

Sam pulled in a deep breath, his lost expression smoothing out as he lifted his head and looked at Dean. "This isn't meant to be, and we know how that goes down, we've done this before, trying to change things, to make them work out."

"Sam…"

Shaking his head, Sam looked at me. "How do we get Cas to undo it?"

"I think, if you…put yourselves out as bait, Atropos will come after you," I said. The draft had been sketchy at that point, but it felt right. "Cas will save you, but you can't tell him that you know it was him behind it."

Dean looked affronted. "Why not?"

"Because this is a glitch, there's a lot more to do," I said, thinking of phoenix ash and killing the Mother of All and keeping Purgatory closed. "And for the moment, at least, Cas has to believe that you think he's the same friend he's been."

He looked away, and his jaw tightened. "But he's not, is he?"

"He's doing what he thinks is the right thing, Dean," I said, trying to explain the angel's actions. I only had the outline of the season to go with, Cas trying to fight Raphael on his own, mostly. "He's just as trapped as we are. If he does nothing, and Raphael wins, the Apocalypse is back on track."

"Alright," Dean said, his tone indicating his unwillingness to pretend that nothing was wrong when he plainly wanted to demand an explanation from Castiel. He seemed to be prepared to keep that need under control. "Tethered goats, tempting Fate."

"You're staying here," Sam said to me tersely.

I thought about that for a long moment. If I went with them, how much more would get screwed up? If I didn't, and something happened, something that I could've prevented, it would screw up everything anyway.

"No," I said, a series of thoughts formulating somewhere in the back of my mind. "No, I won't get in the way, but I've got an idea."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The Mustang smelled of gun oil, a scent I could recognise easily now, and solvent, and a little bit of whiskey – spilled at some time, I thought. I was parked at the end of the busy street, the video camera's zoom lens giving me all the detail I needed. The mike was something else. Sam had pulled it out of his bag, saying it was military. It was directional and I had it perched on the side-mirror, pointing at the Winchesters as they walked up the street slowly toward the car. It was picking up everything, I could hear them and the background noises clearly through the headphones I had on, and hopefully the same quality soundtrack was being recorded to the hard drive.

I was banking on the fact that none of this timeline seemed to be affecting me, as if I was standing on the outside of this world's lines of fate completely. I had an idea of what might happen, not a certainty, just a hope really, and I wanted to get it down, so that if the angel didn't allow them to retain the memory of what'd happened here, I would be able to show them.

Dean and Sam walked along the left-hand side of the street, giving the outside appearance of a casual stroll. I could see that their shoulders were rigidly tense under their jackets, but from a distance they didn't look too bad.

"Okay, so, we're just gonna meet our fate at any time, right?" Dean said, a faint crackle from the mike in my ears, but I could hear the nervousness in his voice anyway.

"Yeah," Sam said, looking around. "Just walk. Act natural."

They stopped abruptly at the foot of a set of steps as a kid shot past their noses on a skateboard.

"Okay," Dean said, jamming his hands into his pockets.

"That's fine," Sam agreed, dodging out of the way of a cyclist as Dean stared at a man coming down the steps toward them, struggling with two German Shepherds, both barking furiously at the brothers as they passed. In the viewfinder of the camera I watched Dean suck in a breath and freeze as he saw what was ahead of them.

"Oh…you gotta be kidding me."

"All right, just…just keep walking," Sam said, his face becoming determined.

"Sam, they're juggling knives," Dean hissed as he followed his brother. "And hatchets."

"Yeah, I know." Sam ducked and hurried across the paving as the jugglers switched to flaming torches. "Can't avoid fate."

I watched them walk through the display, saw the sudden stain of sweat on both of their shirts as they made it through unharmed. Ahead of them, a building front was under renovation and Dean flinched violently as the carpenter swung his nail-gun around, trying to clear a jam, the barrel following the boys as if drawn by a magnet.

"Ah," Dean said, and I'm not sure, but I think he might have been hyperventilating by the time they made it past without getting nailed.

"All right," Sam said, looking behind them. "I don't get it."

"I don't either. Who do you got to kill to get killed around here?" Dean's gaze scanned the street.

"Look out!"

The shout was from above them, and I froze as the camera caught the monstrous air-conditioning unit, falling from the side of the building, the brothers right underneath.

It was, as they say in Hollywood, the money shot. I can't tell you how relieved I was to be right about the angel, about being right that I was on the outside of the timeline in this world thingy, and about right to have the camera in my hand.

For the rest of the world, time had stopped. Completely. Every person standing on the street, sitting in offices above it, the dogs, the skateboarder, the jugglers, all frozen in the split-second that Castiel appeared and a slender, rather bookish-looking blonde woman walked out from the building that the air-conditioner belonged to. Dean and Sam were frozen, both looking up at the air, the shadow of the air-conditioner falling over them.

"Castiel," the blonde woman said curtly, stopping in front of him.

I turned the mike a little more toward them, and held the camera steady. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating so much that I was holding the camera with a death-grip, the only thought running through my head was an agonising loop of how important it was that Sam and Dean hear what the angel said, and how much danger I was in if either Cas or Atropos noticed that the stop-time effect wasn't a hundred percent effective.

"Atropos." Cas looked warily at the Fate. "You look well."

Her nose wrinkled up. "I look like stomped-over crap, because of you."

"All right, let's talk about this," he said resignedly.

"Talk? About what?" she exclaimed, her voice rising. "Maybe about how you and those two circus clowns destroyed my work. You ruined my life!"

"Let's not get emotional."

"Not get emotional?! I had a job," she hissed at him, taking a half-step closer. "God _gave_ me a job. We all had a script. I worked hard. I was really, _really_ good at what I did...until the day of the big prize fight. And then what happens? You throw out the book!"

"Well, I'm sorry. But freedom is more preferable," the angel said, almost prissily, I thought.

"Freedom? This is _chaos_! How is it better?" Atropos demanded shrilly. "You know, I even went to heaven just to ask what to do next, and you know what? No one would even talk to me!"

"There are more pressing matters at hand," Cas said, his gaze moving shiftily to one side. Even I could see he was trying to evade the conversation and Atropos huffed angrily at him.

"But I don't know what happens next. I need to know. It's what I do."

"I'm sorry. But your services are no longer required."

For a long, drawn-out moment, Atropos looked at him, her lips thinned out and her eyes narrowed.

"You know what? I've kept my mouth shut. I could have complained, I could have raised a fuss, but I didn't. But you know what the last straw is? Un-sinking the Titanic. You changed the future. You cannot change the past. That is going too far!"

"It's Balthazar. He's erratic –"

"Bull crap. This isn't about some stupid movie. He's under your orders. You sent him back to save that ship," she said, and I let out a long, slow exhale. Way to go, girl, I thought, watching Cas shift his weight from one foot to the other.

"No, I didn't. Why would I?"

"Oh, maybe because you're in the middle of a war and you're desperate?" she suggested brightly. "Come on. This is about the souls."

"You don't know what you're talking about," Cas countered, but he looked clearly discomforted by her comment, that telling expression caught on camera, and I couldn't wait to hear what she was going to say next.

"That angel went and created fifty thousand new souls for your war machine."

"You're confused," Cas said.

Behind Atropos, Balthazar appeared and I startled at the sight of him, shaking the camera. He was holding a gleaming sword in his hand.

"No. You can't just mint money, Castiel. It's wrong...it's dangerous...and I won't let you," the diminutive Fate said sharply.

"You don't have a choice."

"Maybe I don't. So here's a choice for you," she said, her voice dropping. I could hardly hear the next words. "If you don't go back and sink that boat, I'm going to kill your two favourite pets."

"I won't let you," Cas said, but the worry was clear in his voice.

"Oh, yeah? What are you going to do?" she asked mockingly.

"Do you really want to test me?"

"Okay. Fine," she said, shrugging and looking around the frozen tableau surrounding them. "But think about this, my fine, feathered friend, I've got two sisters out there. And they're bigger…in every sense of the word." She paused slightly for emphasis and I could see that Castiel knew about her sisters, who they were…and what they could do.

"Kill me – Sam and Dean are target one," Atropos told him, her voice dropping low again. "For simple vengeance. You're not fighting a war or anything, right? You can watch them every millisecond of every day?" she asked, sarcastic now. "Because maybe you've heard…Fate strikes when you least expect it."

Behind her, Balthazar was watching Cas' face, the sword raised high over the Fate's back.

"Balthazar, stop," Cas said.

Atropos looked around and saw the angel, who dropped his arm and smiled uncomfortably.

"Aah. Awkward."

I actually saw her eyes roll as she turned back to Castiel. "Set things right before I flick your precious boys off a cliff just on principle," she said.

"Uh, sweetie, before we go, um, I could remove that stick from your –" Balthazar said, with what I thought was an incredible lack of tact.

Apparently the Fate thought so too. "Don't try me," she warned him.

"Oh. We'll leave it inserted, then. All right, then. Let's sink the Titanic," the lanky angel said.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby leaned back in his chair as the screen went to black. "Well, that tells us somethin'."

On either end of the sofa, Dean and Sam exchanged a look. "Tells us that we're not only fighting Crowley and Hell, but now Heaven," Dean said, an acid edge to his voice.

Sam's gaze slid past me and I saw colour rising up his neck, feeling an answering heat in mine. When the angel had re-sunk the ship, we'd all ended up back in Bobby's shed, standing around the circle they'd used to summon the angel. Bobby hadn't noticed anything amiss, not even noticing the video camera I was still clutching in one hand. Sam and Dean had stood looking at each other open-mouthed, remembering it all. And Sam hadn't been able to meet my eyes since.

I'd taken three pregnancy tests while they'd downloaded the footage to Sam's laptop and made a disc and I was at least reassured that that was no longer an issue I had to deal with. Sooner or later, I thought I would have to say something to Sam, but I was dreading that conversation and I couldn't even think of how to open it.

"You still think Balthazar's gonna help us get the phoenix ashes, Dorothy?" Dean asked me, the sardonic tone back in his voice and a coolly appraising smirk on his face.

"We don't need him to," Sam said, clearing his throat when the words came out thickly. "Cas doesn't suspect that we know anything," he continued, sounding more normal. "We'll ask him."

"Where's this phoenix supposed to be?" Bobby looked from Sam to me.

"Sunrise, Wyoming," I said, mostly automatically. The folder had been restored to the one I'd brought with me, with all the notes, outlines and drafts familiar again. The draft of the western episode was quite detailed.

"And what do we kill it with?" Dean asked, one brow lifting.

"The gun that'll kill anything, of course," I said, looking down at the floor. I know I'd wished for Dean's snarky attitude back in the other timeline, but now, having it directed at me for the last thirty hours, I was over it. "Samuel Colt's gun."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

* * *

Bobby scratched his beard, looking doubtfully at me. "So where'd we find out about all this stuff?"

"Samuel's library," I answered absently, wondering if there was a way to stream-line the next part. "He has a book that tells you that the ashes of a phoenix can burn the Mother of All, and he also has Colt's journal which gives the time and place of the death of a phoenix."

"Handy," the old man remarked. I looked at him and shrugged.

"It's TV, what'd you expect from a forty-five minute episode?"

"And Cas is down with taking us back in time?" Dean asked, leaning against the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, a bottle of beer dangling from two fingers.

"He seemed to be," I told him.

"Okay," he said, lifting the bottle and finishing his beer. "I gotta – a thing. Be back in an hour."

"What?" Bobby looked at him.

"Relax, it's related," Dean said, dropping the bottle in the trash can on the way out the back door.

"Related?" Bobby looked at me, eyebrows disappearing under the brim of his cap. "_Related?_"

"Uh…um…" I hedged, giving up the pretence with a sigh and handing him the script. "He's gone shopping."

"What?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Get your hair done too?" Bobby growled at him when he came back in an hour and a half later, shopping bags clearly marked "Wally's Western World" gripped in both hands.

"Bite me," Dean told him cheerfully, dumping a bag next to his brother and heading for the stairs.

Sam leaned over and peered in the top of the bag, his expression pained as he took in its contents.

"What'd he get you?"

Sam pulled out a white shirt, the fabric gleaming and embroidered with fancy yellow roses over either shoulder. He held it up, his expression adequately describing how he felt about it.

Bobby snorted and shook his head. "Didn't figure this."

"He's like a freak when it comes to Westerns, you know that," Sam said tiredly. "He can recite every line from every Clint Eastwood movie ever made."

"Even the monkey ones?"

"_Especially_ the monkey ones."

"His name is Clyde and he's an orang-utan," Dean said from the doorway to the hall.

We all turned around to look at him. He was wearing a cowboy hat, jeans and boots, a dark shirt with a string tie just visible under the stripe serape that covered everything else.

"You goin' to a hoedown?" Bobby asked him, the side of his mouth lifting.

"Sammy, get dressed," Dean continued, ignoring the comment as he walked into the dining room.

"I can't wear this," Sam said, standing up and holding up the bag.

"Sure you can," Dean overrode the expected argument. "You wanna blend in, right?"

Looking into the bag, Sam shook his head. "I can't imagine anywhere I'd 'blend in' wearing this."

"We don't have time for this," Bobby cut them off. "Get on the horn to the angel, I ain't getting' any younger here."

Dean shot a look at his brother and ducked his head, the hat shadowing his face. "Castiel. The, uh, fate of the world is in the balance. So, come on down here. Come on, Cas, I-Dream-of-Jeannie-your-ass down here pronto. Please."

The rustle of wings was expected. The angel who appeared was not. In jeans, a short jacket and a frilly grey blouse, straight blonde hair over her shoulders and sporting a not-very-hidden pained expression on her face, Dean stepped back slightly as she stared expectantly at him.

"Jeannie?" Dean asked, one brow rising as he glanced around to me. I spread my hands helplessly. There was nothing in the script to indicate that Cas had switched vessels.

"Rachel," the blonde said shortly. "I understand you need some assistance? How can I help you?"

"Well, uh, we kind of need to talk to the Big Kahuna," Dean said, looking back at her, frowning a little as he heard the underlying edge to her voice.

"I'm here on Castiel's behalf."

"Where is he?" Sam asked, moving to stand beside Dean.

"Busy," Rachel said, barely looking at him.

"Busy?" Dean asked disbelievingly.

"Yes."

The clipped answer stopped him cold and I thought I'd have to remember that next time I had a confrontation with him. It seemed a lot more dignified than stuttering and babbling some futile explanation anyway. Less is more, I thought to myself.

Dean drew in a breath, a sure indication he'd just about run out of his store of forbearance for the niceties of small talk. "Well, we've got a line on the mother of freaking everything, so –"

"I'm sure your issue's very important. But Castiel is currently commanding an army, so…" she let the sentence trail away pointedly.

"So we get stuck with Miss Moneypenny," Dean finished sourly.

"So you need to learn your place," she said, her tone a hair's breadth from a snap.

Watching her, I could see that she was really getting under Dean's skin. It was a great lesson.

"Look, I don't know who you think you are –" he said, his voice deepening as patience vanished and he realised she wasn't going to budge from her position.

"I'm his friend," Rachel cut him off sharply, emphasising the word a little.

"What, you think we're not?" Sam asked, his tone a bit too defensive. I knew what he was thinking and that the word was sounding a teensy bit hypocritical to him, given what I told them. This time, however, he got her full attention. She turned to look at him coldly.

"I think you call him when you need something," she said bitterly. "We're fighting a war."

"We get that –" he started, but she didn't give him time to say anything else.

"Clearly, you _don't_, or you wouldn't call him every time you stub your toe, you petty, entitled little pie–"

"Rachel. That's enough."

I didn't even hear wings when Castiel appeared, his gravelly voice drowning out the no-doubt choice insult she'd been working her way up to. I was kinda sorry to have missed out on hearing it.

"I told you I'd take care of this."

"It's all right. You can go," Cas told her firmly.

"You're staying?"

I hate to say it because she'd been pretty offensive from the moment she'd appeared, not even giving the brothers the benefit of the doubt, but I actually felt a little sorry for her. Her voice rose and got a bit squeaky as she took in the fact that he was clearly choosing Dean and Sam over her and she was being dismissed out of hand. She probably didn't know the angel as well as she thought she had because insulting the Winchesters did not sit well with him.

"Go. I'll come when I can," he added, his tone softening slightly. It didn't seem to make a difference. She disappeared and I'm sure I heard a disgruntled huff along with the pop of the air zipping back together to fill the space her vessel had taken up.

"Wow. Friend of yours?" Dean asked, his expression showing how unimpressed he'd been with her.

"Yes," Cas said. And I sighed. _Now_ he was standing up for her, not when she'd been dissed by his other friends. Even angels had the capacity to be royal douches. "She's, uh, my lieutenant. She's...committed to the cause. Now, what do you need?"

"A return trip to Sunrise, Wyoming, circa 1861," Sam told him bluntly.

"Why?"

"Need to find us a phoenix," Dean expanded, his good humour returning with the prospect of going Western. He really was the most straightforward man I'd ever seen. "We can take down Eve with its ashes."

The angel looked from him to Sam. "I can give you twenty-four hours, that's all."

"Why?"

"The further back I send you, the harder it becomes to retrieve you. Twenty-four hours is all I can risk. If I don't pull you home within that time, you'll be lost."

The brothers exchanged a glance and Dean shrugged. "Twenty-four hours it is," he said. "C'mon, Sam, wear the damned hat at least."

He pulled it out of the bag and passed it to his brother. It was plain. Sam sighed softly and took it.

Bobby walked to the scroll-top desk against the wall and pulled out a small cotton bag. It clinked softly as he carried to Dean and handed it over.

"What's this?" Dean asked as he pulled open the draw-string and looked inside.

"Don't take plastic where you're going, son," Bobby said heavily, rolling his eyes.

Dean lifted the blanket – sorry, the _serape_ – up and tied the bag to his belt as Cas turned to face them.

"I'll send you back to March 4th," he said, looking at them. "That should give you sufficient time to find what you need."

He lifted his hands and touched them lightly on the forehead and they disappeared.

It was a bizarre thing to watch.

I'm a huge fan of the show, and a pretty big fan of the genre, actually, and I kept thinking it should've looked natural, you know, should've looked…normal. But it didn't. They vanished into thin air and Cas turned around, his eyes deep blue and I couldn't get a breath into my chest, mouth opening and closing like an out-of-water fish.

"Are you alright?" the angel asked me, and Bobby turned to look at me as well, slapping his hand on my back as I stood there gasping for air. It worked. The next breath went in and I guess I stopped turning blue in front of them.

"I have to go," Cas said to Bobby, probably deciding that I wasn't a part of the decision-making process here.

"What about the boys getting' back?" Bobby asked immediately and I could hear the suspicion in his voice. Fortunately Cas didn't, or at least, didn't seem to pay it any mind.

"Pray for me in twenty-four hours and I will return."

"I'll be prayin' for all of us," Bobby confirmed sourly, turning to the desk as the angel disappeared and picking up a timer. He set it for twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes after glancing at his watch and put it down, looking at me.

"Well, any bright ideas?"

"We should probably go and get Samuel's library," I said. "The more resources we've got, the better off we are, right?"

He nodded, a trace of humour showing in his eyes. "Not bad. Might make somethin' out of ya."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The truck was noisy, cold and uncomfortable, but it made good time. I was hunched in the corner of the passenger side, my jacket as tight around me as I could get it, just trying to Zen my way through the trip.

"What's goin' on between you and Sam?" Bobby asked, well, half-shouted, at me, his gaze staying on the headlight-lit road in front of us.

"Nothing," I said back, absolutely not wanting to talk about that.

"Doesn't look like nothing," he persisted, this time throwing a quick look my way.

Bobby didn't remember the alternative time-line and Dean had been specific that it would stay that way. It wasn't like I could've explained the whole disastrous sideways journey to him, even if I'd kept the details of his alternative life a secret. He knew that something had happened, because he'd read the outline of the script. He didn't know exactly what the something was because my presence had apparently completely screwed over how the writers had seen it anyway.

"It's not important," I said.

He muttered something and I had the feeling it wasn't 'Happy Birthday' but there was no way I was saying anything else.

"Why you?" he asked, a few minutes later, and I wondered what he was trying to figure out with all these questions.

"I don't know," I told him, honestly enough. I _didn't_ know. "Wrong place, wrong time?"

"No such thing as coincidence, in this life," he said, taking his eyes off the road to turn and give me a long look.

"You think this was – is – like their life? Planned somehow?" I asked him, and I'm afraid a note of disbelief found its way into my voice with that idea. Destiny was for people like the Winchesters, people who did things, who changed things just by being themselves. It wasn't something that centred itself – or even _noticed_ – someone like me.

"I don't know," he admitted, his voice gruff. "Just seems strange that the angel they've been relying on has turned his back and then you show up with at least some of the answers."

I huffed at the glass beside me. "I'm not sure that the answers I've got are so good, Bobby," I said, pulling my legs up and wrapping my arms around them as I leaned back against the passenger door. "They haven't done much for them."

"Maybe, maybe not," Bobby said. "But we'll see when the dust settles and we can figure out the wins and losses."

He turned to look at me again. "You ain't one of those fan-girls, like Becky, are you?"

The thought of being compared to Becky was like getting a bucket of ice water thrown over me. I attempted a mocking snort and nearly choked on it, coughing and sputtering for several minutes before I got my breathing back under control.

"No, not like Becky," I said, shaking my head. "Guess you could call me a fan, though," I added, a little reluctantly since the word had connotations that weren't all that complimentary. "I liked the first three seasons the best."

Bobby's mouth turned down as he calculated what those seasons had covered. "Those were nearly the worst years of their lives."

"I know, I didn't mean it like –"

"Yeah, I get it," he said, his voice softening a little. "When they got into your world, how'd you know it wasn't the actors that were playin' them?"

"The scars," I said simply. "The actors don't have any."

He laughed at that. "I bet."

This time the silence that followed was companionable and I was just starting to relax, drift off a little even when he cleared his throat.

"You get any idea from that tv show that Dean got a handle on what happened to him?" he asked me. "Or that Sam did?"

What happened to them, I thought uneasily. That covered a lot of ground.

"No," I said. "Not on the show."

I turned and looked at him. "What about here? There's so much we didn't see, weeks, months, Dean's year with Lisa and Ben…have either of them talked about it? To you, or-or anyone else?"

"No."

The single short word encompassed a lot of pain. It seemed to fill the cab of the truck as we both thought of all the things the brothers had gone through, and I thought with a sinking feeling, were still to get through.

He slowed down, peering into the darkness at the street name as we passed. "Next one on the way outta town," he said quietly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The compound was dark and empty when Bobby drove past it, the chain-link fences and razor-wire topping them shedding light as the truck's headlights lit them up and passed.

"Looks empty," he remarked, not particularly to me. "We'll go right round, take a slow look."

"Where are they all?" I asked him, looking at the buildings. I couldn't see a single vehicle in there.

"Hunting for Crowley, runnin' for their lives? Who knows?" Bobby said, slowing as he came to a gate in the fence at the rear. There was no reaction from anywhere when he nosed the truck up to the gate and put it in Park.

"Slide over," he said to me, opening the driver's door. "You hear or see anything, turn this thing around and put your foot down."

"What about you?"

"I'll be on the back, keepin' my damned head down," he said, with a sniff.

No one came out firing when he walked up to the gate and he lifted the chains up, the open padlock showing in the headlights. Unthreading the chain from the gate, he let it fall, pushing the gates open and leaving them like that as he walked back to the truck.

"Looks like they've gone," he said, climbing back in. We drove along the bumpy gravel road and Bobby stopped next to the largest building, turning off the engine and reaching behind the seat for his gun. "Any ideas on where we might this fabulous library?"

"It was under Samuel's private office," I said, looking around. Which building held Samuel Campbell's private office was anyone's guess.

"Well, we'll start with this one and work our way through," Bobby said with a sigh.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We found the library an hour later, and Bobby nodded enthusiastically when he started to read off the titles. I was sent off to find boxes and when I got back with a dozen, he'd already started to stack the books along the table, ready for packing.

Nothing else happened in the compound. When the library had been packed and loaded, we checked out the other buildings. They'd been roughly packed up, Bobby thought, most of the weapons and ammunition had been taken, but there was a lot left there as well.

"Why didn't they take this stuff?" I asked him when we got back in the truck and he reversed down the narrow road. "It must've been hard to find it, originally?"

"Got me," he said, spinning the wheel and driving back out through the gates, pointing us back toward South Dakota. "Maybe they panicked?"

I looked at him curiously. "_Do_ hunters panic?"

Shooting me a sideways grin, Bobby said, "Oh hell, yeah, everyone panics at some point."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We turned into the yard just after dawn, the truck bumping down the driveway and both of us yawning our heads off. Bobby stopped in front of the porch and we carried the boxes in, leaving them stacked to one side of the dining room for a closer look. I made a pot of strong coffee, because neither of us were going to be able to relax enough for sleep until Sam and Dean were back.

I'd just filled a cup and put it down in front of Bobby when Cas appeared on the floor of the kitchen behind us. I saw Bobby's eyes widen dramatically and heard a groan and the angel was struggling to his knees, his bloody hand hitting the fridge door.

"Christ," Bobby muttered, getting up and walking around the table. "Gimme a hand with him."

I followed him into the kitchen as Cas swiped a circle in red on the door, drawing the sigil clumsily.

"What the hell's goin' on? Cas!?" Bobby said, looking at the mark as Cas clambered to his feet. "Cas? We runnin' or fightin'?"

"We're –"

He fell into Bobby's arms, and I scurried up beside them, grabbing the angel's arm and pulling it over my shoulder as Bobby did the same on the other side.

"Balls."

"Where?" I grunted. He didn't look that heavy but I could hardly keep my knees from going under half his weight.

"Sofa," Bobby said shortly, taking more of the angel's weight as we staggered across the kitchen like a bunch of drunks.

When he was lying on the sofa, Bobby turned and barked at me, "Medical kit's in the bathroom, I'll need a bowl of hot water as well."

I sprinted out of the living room and got the kit, a great big box painted white from the cupboard in the downstairs bath, then pulled a big mixing bowl from the kitchen cupboard and filled it with hot water. Trying to carry both defeated me immediately and I took the box first, then went back for the bowl.

"Salt, towels, there's a bottle of clear alcohol in the cupboard next to the sink, grab that too," Bobby ordered and I ran back out.

I got back to see that Bobby'd undone Cas' shirt and along with the blood flowing steadily from the oddly-shaped hole in his side, a brilliant white light was also leaking out, lighting Bobby's face brightly.

"Can you fix that?"

He shook his head. "I doubt it, just gonna plug up the hole so's he don't lose too much blood." He jerked his head toward the desk. "How much time the boys got left?"

I looked at the timer. "An hour."

He'd just finished cleaning the hole and had taped a thick dressing over it when Cas' eyes opened and the angel sat up.

"Cas, you-you look like you went twelve rounds with Truckasaurus. What the hell happened?" Bobby sat back on his heels, looking at him.

"I was, uh...I was betrayed. Rachel, uh...Raphael...he corrupted her. She turned on me," Cas said, reaching up to press against the dressing.

"Sorry. Girl's a real... peach."

"She's... dead. I... was wounded. I needed... safety. Thank you," he said, the words coming out in fits and starts. He leaned forward, trying to get up and started coughing, and both Bobby and I saw the sweat that covered his face with the effort. Bobby pushed him down impatiently, looking down at him.

"Hey, hey, hey, hey, slow down there," he said, and waved his hand toward the kitchen. "What's with the finger painting?"

"It's a warding symbol against angels," Cas said, wheezing.

"How bad's it hurt?" Bobby asked, looking down at the dressing. It'd already turned red.

"I'll heal."

"Well, good...'cause we got less than an hour before you pick up the kids at Frontierland," Bobby said gruffly.

The angel looked up at him, his face stricken. "I can't."

It definitely was not what Bobby wanted to hear. "Come again?"

"The wound...drained me," Cas admitted.

"Well, if you're up on blocks, then call in another halo who can get the job done."

"I can't."

"There's got to be something that can juice you up. A spell…somethin'."

I could hear the desperation starting to lace Bobby's voice. He didn't mind facing a bunch of dark buildings with the possibility of getting shot just for a bunch of books that might prove useful sometime in the future, but the idea that he wouldn't see Sam and Dean again, the idea that they might be trapped in a world that wasn't theirs with no way of getting home, that he couldn't face.

Cas must have heard that desperation as well, because a reckless look filled his eyes. "There is one thing that might work, but...it's extremely dangerous."

"Shocker," Bobby said sardonically. "So, lay it on me."

"It's your soul," Cas said, his voice dropping as if he was suggesting some kind of blasphemous act. Maybe it was.

"What do you want me to do? Make another deal? Seal it with a kiss?" Bobby asked tersely, and he didn't look happy with the idea of any of those things. He turned and looked at me, and I couldn't do anything but shake my head at him. None of this had been in the original script, I'd been wondering if there wasn't a big rewrite going on back home.

"I need you to let me touch it," Cas said.

"Touch it?"

"The human soul – it's pure...energy. If I can siphon some of that off, I-I might be able to bring Sam and Dean back."

Bobby tilted his head to look at him warily. "And the catch is...?"

"Doing this is like...putting your hand in a nuclear reactor. I have to do it very slowly, very carefully," he explained unwillingly.

"Or...?"

"Or you'll explode."

"Well. Keep both hands on the wheel," Bobby advised the angel, throwing me a look. "Let's do this."

"No," I said, not sure why, but stepping toward them anyway. "Bobby, no offence but you're on the wrong side of sixty," I added, looking at the angel. "You've got a better chance of not killing someone younger, right?"

"Normally," the angel said, with an apologetic look at the hunter. "That would be correct. However, I can't touch your soul, not here."

"Why?"

"Because this isn't where you're supposed to be," he said, somewhat cryptically. "We don't have the time for me to explain the nature of the different worlds my Father created right now."

He looked back at Bobby. "Are you sure about this?"

"No, I'm not damned sure," Bobby growled at him. "But we can't just strand those idjits in Deadwood, can we?"

"It's very painful," Cas warned him, a bit of a bad time to mention it, I thought.

"Great, just what I wanted to hear," Bobby snapped. "Just do it."

I reached out and grabbed Bobby's hand as the angel pushed his under Bobby's ribs. Bobby held on for as long as he could, jaws clenched tight and the sinews standing out on his neck as his head tipped back. Just about crushed my hand with his fingers, which shows how dumb I was to give it to him instead of finding a leather belt or something he crush without it hurting me.

Then he screamed and it pulsed through the house like a fire alarm, rising and rising until I was worried he was going to burst the veins in his throat with the force of it or have a stroke or give himself a heart attack. I didn't give it much more thought, though, I was pretty close to screaming myself by that point.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Dean was still kneeling when he reappeared in Bobby's living room, his hand brushing the carpet. Sam stood behind him a couple of paces and looked around, seeing Cas kneeling in front of Bobby, who was half-unconscious in the armchair, and me cradling my hand against my chest, all three of us milk-white and sickly-looking, I thought, from Sam's sudden change of expression.

"What happened?" he asked, striding past Dean to Bobby.

"Long story," I said, going to the sideboard and pulling out a bottle of Bobby's best. "Can you give him a shot?"

I couldn't undo the cap one-handed and Sam frowned as he took the bottle from me, unscrewing the cap and tipping a little into Bobby's mouth. The hunter's eyelids flickered and he opened his eyes slowly.

"Good to see ya, Sam," he said, lifting his head just far enough to see Dean on the floor behind the angel. "You too, boy."

Dean nodded as he looked at the empty bottle in his hands. "Cas, you gotta send us back!"

"Dean, look at him. He's fried," Sam said, kneeling in front of Cas and helping him to his feet.

"I never want to do that again," the angel groaned, tottering the two feet to the sofa and collapsing onto it.

Dean suddenly noticed the shade of Bobby's face. "Bobby, you –"

"I'm still kickin', Annie Oakley. Be back good as new in...a decade or two," he said slowly.

"And we screwed the pooch," Dean said, looking at his bottle, his shoulders slumping. "Bobby, I'm sorry."

The knock on the front door seemed too incongruous to be real and it took a second hard rapping before Sam passed the whiskey to Dean and walked down the hall to open it.

"Is there a Sam Winchester here?"

Dean gave Bobby another shot and I walked to the sofa to sit next to the angel.

"Who's asking?" Sam's voice rumbled indistinctly.

"Look, this is nuts…me and a couple guys made a bet. So…this thing's been laying around the office since...ever!? Uh, with a note on it saying to bring it here today. It's from a-a Samuel Colt?"

"Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's-that's mine. Great. Thanks," Sam said quickly, his voice a lot higher than usual. "Thanks!"

"Not going to believe this," Sam muttered as he came back into the room, ripping the paper from the box and slitting the top. "Dear Sam, I got this address and date off your…thingamajig, and I thought the enclosed might come in handy. Regards, Samuel Colt."

He reached into the box and pulled out his phone, smiling a little at it. Under another layer of paper, he found the bottle. Old-fashioned glass and filled with something almost black.

"That what I think it is?" Bobby leaned forward as Dean got to his feet and took the bottle from his brother.

"Ashes of a Phoenix," he said, looking at it, his face expressionless, but his eyes all lit up. "You know what this means?"

"Yeah," Bobby said with a grimace at the angel on the sofa. "I didn't get a _soulonoscopy_ for nothing."

Dean blinked. "Yes," he acknowledged, realising that he needed to hear more about that but not right now. "And... it means we take the fight to her."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Keep your hand in the water," Sam admonished as he unrolled the start of a bandage. "How come none of the angel stuff was in the script?"

"I don't know," I said, gritting my teeth as he moved my hand from the bowl of boiling hot water to the bowl of freezing cold water. "What's the point of this torture again?"

"Brings down the swelling," Dean said, coming around the table behind me and pulling out a chair. "Bobby didn't break any bones, just bruised them real good."

"If that script was wrong, and the other one, how can we trust the rest of what's in there to be right?" Sam looked at his brother as he put my hand back in the boiling water. It probably wasn't actually boiling, just felt that way. Especially after the bowl filled with ice-cubes.

I sucked a breath in through my teeth, making a whistling sound as my hand turned from blue back to an angry red. "The broad strokes were there, but not the details."

"Devil's in the details," Dean pointed out unhelpfully.

"Most of the script covered what you and Sam were doing in 1861," I said, looking at him to avoid looking at my hand as Sam lifted it out again. "Did you read it? Were those details right?"

To my surprise, Dean looked away and Sam snorted.

"Ah, yeah, some of them," Dean said, keeping his eyes on the far wall.

"They were nearly all right," Sam said, his dimples very evident as the corners of his mouth tucked in. "The rotgut whiskey, the saloon girls…"

"Alright, alright!" Dean shook his head. "There were a couple of things that were off, Finch's wife was attacked but not just by the deputy," he said. "The sheriff was in on that as well."

"Bit much for prime-time?" I suggested.

He shrugged. "What about Colt, Sam?"

"Pretty much word for word," Sam said, patting my hand dry. I tried to ignore how that felt and focus on what he was saying. "He was a lot more surly than it was written though."

"More like Rufus?" Dean asked, his mouth lifting to one side.

"More like you, in fifty years," Sam said, looking at him.

"So, if we take out the smoothing and polishing for a tv audience," I said slowly, looking from Sam to Dean. "And maybe the parts of the episode that don't focus strictly on you two…?"

"Maybe," Dean admitted. "How well do you remember those episodes, anyway?"

"All of them, you mean?" I asked him, wondering why he wanted to know. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy a good discussion of the seasons and their episodes, but it wasn't that easy to talk to either of them about what were, to them, events in their personal lives.

"Yeah," he said, putting his beer on the table, his gaze locked onto the table top.

"Pretty well, I think."

"Why?" Sam wanted to know. I was glad he asked, since it meant I didn't have to.

"Because we could probably figure out how accurate these things are," Dean said, waving a hand at my folder. "If we can judge for ourselves," he finished.

Sam was smoothing some kind of creamy paste over the back of my hand and I got the distinct feeling that his brother was noticing something that I was missing.

"Okay," I said, turning my hand over as Sam scooped another gob of the stuff onto his fingers. "Where do you want to start?"

Dean pursed his lips, his gaze flashing up to gauge his brother's expression then down again.

"Uh, not sure," he said, suddenly evasive. "We'll talk about it later."

"Later?" Sam looked up at him, his eyes narrowing. "We don't have that much time."

"Well, Dorothy's had a hard day, and we haven't had any sleep for more than forty-eight hours," Dean said reasonably. "I could use four hours. And she'll need a decent pain-killer to take the edge off that."

He got up, walking out casually. It was, I thought as I watched him, pure Dean-diversionary tactics. And as transparent as it always was.

Sam wasn't fooled, his mouth compressing as he finished the basting and picked up the bandage. He wound it around my hand, slowing down as he got near the end of it. I could see that he was no longer thinking about his brother's tactics and I dropped my gaze to the table.

"Terry," he said as he fastened the end and tucked the tail under. "About what happened, in the, um, other time-line."

I looked up at him and nodded uncomfortably, trying to keep my face expressionless.

"You, uh, you didn't have any of the previous memories, did you?"

"No," I said. "When I woke up, all I remembered was that we'd just summoned Balthazar."

He looked at the bowl of hot water, steam still rising slowly from it.

"It, um, feels weird, right now," he said uncertainly. "I mean, I remember summoning Balthazar too, but I also, uh, have memories of that other life. You know?"

"It wasn't real, Sam," I said it as gently as I could, but he still flinched back.

"Yeah," he said quickly, pushing his chair back from the table. "Yeah, I know that."

"Sam," I said, getting up as well. I didn't know if he'd wanted it be real or if he was just embarrassed about his memories, or what exactly was going on with him. It hadn't been real, and I couldn't say anything that would make that feel better if that was what he'd wanted. "I'm sorry."

He looked at me briefly before he reached out to take the two bowls. "For what?" he said lightly, turning to the kitchen. "Uh, hang on a sec and I'll get you the pain-killers."

I sank back slowly into the chair. From the hallway, I heard a slight noise. I turned around, but there wasn't anyone there. At least, not in view.

Sam was rummaging in the cupboards, and he came back with a small white bottle in his hand, his fingertips brushing mine as he handed it to me.

"Sam."

He was gathering up the cream and the wrapping from the bandage, dropping things as fast as he picked them up, and he stopped, waiting.

"Did you want it to be real?" I asked, wishing I could've asked anything other than that.

For an eternally long moment, he didn't move, didn't say anything or look up. Then he exhaled softly and shrugged. "I don't know. It feels like it _was_ real, you know, the memories of everything," he said quietly. "They're as…present…as any other memory I've got. Makes it all kind of suspect." He looked up then, smiling slightly. "It's my problem, not yours. I'll work it out."

I nodded as he turned away and took the trash to the kitchen, my fingers closing hard around the bottle in my hand. They were strong, and two of them would give me four or five hours complete escape from all of this. I got up and headed for the stairs, the promise of that the only thing kept me putting one foot in front of the other.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**AN:**__ I hope that the story's still enjoyable. The fun bits come and go, since it _is_ Season 6, after all. Let me know what you think, I live for feedback!_


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

* * *

There are definitely days when, with hindsight and in retrospect, it would have been a really, really good idea not to get out of bed at all. Today was one of those days.

The pills knocked me out, which was great. Unfortunately, they left me with a cotton-wool hangover – you know, the ones where your brain takes a vacation and leaves without providing a forwarding address, or any indication of when it might be back – and a taste like I'd been chewing on road-kill all night long in my mouth. I got my feet caught in the sheets – again, and you can bet your bottom dollar I'll be sleeping _without_ a top sheet in the future – when I tried to get out of bed, hitting the floor full-length with a thump that knocked every last bit of breath out of my lungs. Then I stubbed my toe on the dresser leg as I tried to get vertical and dressed before the Three Musketeers charged into my bedroom to see if I was being attacked by demons, and as a result, when the door opened as expected, I was red-faced, swearing and hopping around on one leg with my jeans part of the way on and the free leg caught in the not-quite-properly-closed dresser drawer and as I spun away from them, it yanked me backwards and dropped me on my ass in front of them. Thankfully, this time, they just emitted a collective sigh, turned around, closed the door and went away.

Things went marginally better until I got to the kitchen. By that, I mean I managed to dress myself, complete the washing of face and brushing of teeth without drowning myself. The kitchen, however, was a much more reactive place. I reached for a clean mug, and somehow, do _not_ ask me how, missed the handle completely, swiping ineffectually at the body of the cup and sweeping it off the shelf and onto the floor where it broke into twenty pieces.

Of course.

I got out the dustpan and brush and cleaned that up, banged the back of my head on the cupboard door as I tried to stand up, knocked the trash can over, and I mean, right out of the damned cupboard, spilling crap everywhere, and wished I'd never been born when Dean's sarcastic offer of help came from the dining room.

"You need a seeing-eye dog today, Dorothy?"

I tell you, the temptation to flop down on the floor, burst into tears and just spend the day there was pretty overwhelming. You'll be happy to know I managed to resist it.

"You okay?" Sam said from beside me as I crouched next to the trash spread over the cracked linoleum, my eyes tightly shut. It was the sympathy in his voice that got me going. No way was I gonna break down in front of him, or his _brother_, while I was still breathing.

"Yep, just a bit clumsy for some reason," I said, swallowing down my self-pity with an ill-timed hiccup. I opened my eyes and swept the trash back into the can, righted it, looked up carefully to make sure I didn't hit my head again, closed the cupboard and got to my feet on very wobbly knees.

Sam put a cup of coffee into my hand and I closed both hands around it to make sure I didn't somehow end up throwing it over him, because, you know, that's definitely the direction the day was going in.

"Thanks."

"Sit down –"

"Before you fall down – _again_," Dean injected cheerfully, ignoring Sam's warning look.

"And drink your coffee," Sam finished sharply as Bobby came in.

"What do we know about Eve's location?" Bobby asked, walking, I just happened to notice, without any kind of mishap to the counter and pouring himself a coffee. Must just be me, I decided, as I watched him drink from the cup – _without spilling a drop_ – at the same time he walked back to the table.

"Here," I said, reaching for the folder. I bumped my cup, naturally, but it didn't tip over and I eased the script out and passed it to him.

"Grants Pass, Oregon," Bobby read out loud, frowning as he skimmed over the rest. "Not much in here."

"There was a meeting with the writer a few weeks ago," I said, picking up my cup carefully. "The gist was a showdown with Eve and the new hybrid monsters she was creating."

"Come again?" Dean asked, leaning forward and frowning at me. "_Hybrid_ monsters?"

"Cross between a vampire, wraith and ghoul," Bobby read from the notes jotted at the bottom of the draft script. "What the hell does that mean?"

I looked at my notes, which had gone to the production team to prepare for the episode. "Fangs, the wraith spike in the wrist and the desire to eat human flesh," I read out, wishing I'd added a bit more detail.

"Awesome!" Dean leaned back in his chair and looked at his brother. "How do we kill 'em?"

"I think decapitation with a silver blade takes care of it," I said, from the interior of my cup, sadly now almost empty. I was starting to understand why actors liked using props. Something to do with your hands when you were the focus of attention.

"This says … crap, I'm not sure what it says," Bobby grumbled, handing the pages back to me. I looked at the handwritten notes interspersed through the typed paragraphs. My boss' hand-writing, which had often made people wonder why she gave up medical school for television.

"The hybrids aren't successful. There's a mutated virus that kills them after a few days," I read out, more of the discussion on the episode coming back with the words. "The virus, which I think was blood-borne, turns them into copies of the first infected when they do it."

I frowned at that, looking back through the pages of the script. Except that it didn't, I thought. There were supposed to be multiple 'Eds' in the episode, but the sheriff, his deputies, the townsfolk and the people in the diner weren't copies, they were all themselves. Infected personally by Eve, I wondered? What was the point of the scene in the bar then?

"What!?" Dean said, thumping his cup on the table. "So we got shifter crap in there as well?"

I opened my mouth to explain, then closed it again when I realised I couldn't.

"What about Eve?" Sam asked quietly, forcing the conversation back on track.

"According to that," Bobby said, waving a hand at the script. "We pack shotgun shells full of the ashes and just look through the town for her."

"Yeah, but there's a back up plan," I said, pushing aside the illogical story point and trying to fish the exact nature of how they succeed from my muddled, cotton-wool memory, my fingers scrabbling through the bits of paper that seemed to have details of costumes, locations, types of weapons, extra casting, alternative scene storyboards, but no note on what I was looking for. "Dean does something else."

"What something else do I do?" he asked suspiciously.

"Keep looking," Bobby advised me, catching and stabilising my cup as I hit it for the second time with my elbow, and moving it further away from the battle zone. "You wanna drive?"

"Gives us more flexibility," Dean said, his tone almost reasonable if not for the transparent desire of not wanting to go somewhere without the Impala.

"It'll take us two days to drive over," Bobby argued mildly. "Cas could get us there in an eyeblink and we could be done with this by tomorrow night. Think it's time to make a call."

"Why do I always have to make the call?" Dean looked from Bobby to Sam. "Not like he's my angel."

Sam shrugged. "He shows up when you call."

"He shows up for you too," Dean said, scowling at the table top. "He, uh, well, he just didn't when you were flying soulless for a while there."

"Stop bitchin', take one for the team," Bobby growled at him, losing patience. "We should be ready to go when he gets here. You two start packing those ashes, we'll try and get more intel from this –" He looked at the untidy heap of papers I'd made in the centre of the table. "–stuff."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I leaned back in the armchair, making little circles over my temples with my fingertips as Bobby read the notes on the back of the envelope I'd finally found, squished in between a receipt for ten take-away coffees and two large scale maps of the outskirts of Vancouver. The little circles didn't help much, the headache was obviously gonna be a stayer.

"You sure about this?" he asked me, and I could hear the doubt in his voice.

"They roughed the scene with Eve in a 'round table'," I said, remembering _that_ in vivid detail, six writers, two producers, a half dozen script assistants all sitting around the big table in the writers' room more or less shouting over the top of each other as they came up with more and more outrageous ideas to get the characters out of the impossible situation they'd written themselves into. "Not big on scientific rationale, but they liked the solution, because it meant it could be a surprise."

"Some surprise," Bobby said, shaking his head. "You better go tell Dean about this, and be ready for some yellin'."

I got up slowly and headed for the door to the basement. I don't know why they didn't hear me, I'm not usually that pad-footed on a good day, and today, as we've already seen, was not a good day.

They say eavesdroppers never hear anything good about themselves. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn't trying to deliberately eavesdrop. I mean it wasn't _good_ in the strictest sense of the word anyway. It was _personal_. And I definitely didn't want to hear it. But by the time I got halfway down the stairs, I knew they'd hear me if I tried to turn around and go back up and that would look _so_ much worse.

"It's not that simple," Sam said to Dean, shoulders hunched over the bench, filling the shells with a dark, grainy powder I guessed was the phoenix ashes.

"Sure it is," Dean said, sitting next to him, setting the plastic shells into the press and pulling down the lever that sealed the cap on. "You got feelings for her, just tell her about it, see what happens."

Sam shook his head. "I have memories of getting married, Dean," he said uncomfortably. "Of living together for two years, o-o-of going to see the doctor, talking about-about-due dates – I don't want to date her, we did all of that."

"Except, that you didn't," Dean pointed out unhelpfully, setting another casing in place, the comment underlined by the clunk of the press.

"Exactly. I didn't," Sam said. "And now …"

"And now, you're stuck."

"Yeah," Sam sighed. "I don't know why I'm talking to you about this – you had a crush on Monica Belmont and didn't tell her about it the whole time we were in Barstow till the day before we left."

"I didn't have a 'crush'," Dean said loftily.

Sam looked at him. "Well, whatever you want to call it."

"You talk to me 'cause I'm your big brother and you're _supposed_ to talk to me about all this shit," Dean said, sealing another shell. "And I'm the first to admit that I'm not all that great on the advice in this arena, dude, but I'll tell you this. Whoever that was, in your memories, in that alternative life, it wasn't Terry."

"What do you mean?" Sam frowned at him.

"I mean, you don't _know_ Terry, _we_ don't know her," Dean said, taking the casing from his brother's fingers and packing it. "She blew in, what three-four weeks ago? Screwed us all to hell with stuff about the future that we can't even work out if it's real or partly real, or completely left field – you don't know her. So those memories, they're like – like watching a movie."

"Yeah, maybe," Sam said, looking down at the bench. "You think I should just forget about it?"

"I think that you should stop worrying about it, an' start worrying about how we're gonna gank the mother of all monsters with five friggin' shells," Dean said, looking down at the completed casings by his elbow. "I think we've got a lot more problems right now than we can deal with and this … _stuff_ … it'll wait."

"Yeah, okay," Sam said, looking at the pile of ashes left on the bench and pushing out the chair he was sitting in.

I backed up the steps as silently as I could and then thumped back down them, both of them turning to look at me as I hit the bottom step.

Sam's ears turned red and I ignored that as best as I could. "Hey!"

"I'll tell Bobby we're just about done," he said, inching past me to the steps.

"Call Cas," Dean called loudly after him. "Not my job to call him all the time."

"Yeah, well, I'll try," Sam's voice drifted down the steps then the basement door opened and closed.

"I found the backup plan," I said to Dean as he looked at me questioningly.

"I can hardly wait," he said, scooping up the finished shells and stuffing in his pocket as he stood.

"You need to take some of the ashes and mix them with something and drink them."

His eyes widened and the effect would've been comical if he hadn't been so obviously gob-smacked.

"What?"

"You figure that if all else fails, and she gets the drop on you and Sam somehow, she'll probably bite you, drink your blood. So you drink the phoenix ashes so they'll be in your bloodstream if she does kill you, and at least it'll kill her," I explained nervously. For the character on the show, that kind of altruistic behaviour was normal. For the real, actual and standing-in-front-of-me Dean Winchester, I wasn't so sure.

"Huh," he said, turning to look at the pile of ash. "Well, that's a Plan B alright."

He looked back at me, eyes narrowing slightly. "And it works?"

"Well, they were going to put it in the script," I hedged. "However this is working, however they can see what you're doing, what's going on here, it seems to be pretty accurate."

"Some of the time," he said, his lip curling up.

"Most of the time," I corrected him. "If the focus is on you and Sam. Which it will be."

"Why would that be?"

"I don't know," I said, turning for the stairs.

"Wait a sec," he said, leaning forward and catching my arm. "Let's run a little ad-hoc test here. What happened in Cicero, when I went looking for Lisa?"

"The first time?" I asked and he nodded.

I looked down at the floor for a moment. "It was Ben's birthday party and Lisa was distracted when you got there, because she thought her friend was going nuts. You saw Ben and did the math and figured he could be your son." I looked up at him, seeing his expression had smoothed out to nothing, his eyes dark and closed-off. "After you and Sam saved all the kids from the changeling mother and the changelings were all killed, you asked Lisa if Ben was your son. She said that she was a hundred percent sure he wasn't, she'd had blood tests done. She asked you to stay with them for a while and you said no. You told her it wasn't your life."

"Fuck," he breathed, letting go of my arm and twisting away. I wasn't sure if I should stay or leave. I also wondered how many more of these memories he wanted to go through before he'd believe that in my world, his life was a tv show.

"I wanted him to be mine," he said a moment later, his back to me and his voice low. "But at the same time, I didn't."

"I know," I said, remembering the road he'd been on then. He'd made the deal and he was going to Hell. "It wasn't fair to any of you."

He turned around then, looking at me, his eyes searching for something. I got the feeling he wanted to say something else, but it didn't come out and I nodded and walked back up the stairs, my legs shaking with the strange sense that I'd just missed out on something, something monumental, without even realising it properly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"She's hidden to me, invisible to all angels," Cas was saying to Bobby as they stood in the dining room.

"Well, that's great," Dean said, shoving his hands into his pockets. I wasn't sure if he found the time to drink the ashes or not.

"Doesn't matter," Bobby said. "Let's do it."

I was sitting at the table, rearranging the papers in the folder so that at some later date I would be able to find what I was looking for.

"You're coming," I heard the deep voice say and looked up in surprise.

"What? No," Dean and Sam said in perfect unison, glancing at each other.

"She doesn't need to be in the firing line –" Sam said.

"We don't need her tripping over somethin' and wrecking a good stake-out," Dean fired out a half-second later.

It's good to feel appreciated.

"She's coming," Cas said, gesturing at me.

"Why?" Dean stood his ground, staring at the angel.

"Because I'll need her for something," Castiel said evenly to him, his gaze flat.

"Wastin' time," Bobby reminded them and I got up and walked to his side.

The wrenching jolt of angel-assisted travel was a shock, I don't mind telling you. Everything went black and I couldn't hear anything, couldn't see, touch, taste, or smell anything. It was like…heck; I don't know what it was like! Like being dead, maybe? Or buried alive? That little zinger of a thought sent a blast of adrenalin through me.

Then we landed, if you can call it that, with a bone-crunching suddeness on a pavement in a little town with clean, quiet streets that were lined with trees.

"Well," Dean said, looking around critically. "I was expecting more Zombieland, less Pleasantville."

"Just because it looks quiet, don't mean it is," Bobby said dryly. "I need a computer."

We walked across the street to the diner on the other side, and I was a bit surprised that we weren't getting more looks from the locals. I mean, we'd materialised out of thin air on the pavement. No one even glanced at us as we took a booth to the side.

"Might as well eat," Dean said, not needing the excuse as he looked over the menu.

Sam passed Bobby his tablet and Bobby grimaced at it. "I said I needed a computer."

"It is a computer."

"No," he said, looking at it. "A computer's got buttons."

"What can I get you?" The waitress appeared at Dean's elbow and smiled around the table.

Her name tag said "Angela" and I don't know about the rest of them, but something about her sent a deep shiver right down my spine. I felt Cas' gaze turn curiously to me.

"Burger, fries, coffee, pie," Dean rattled off without looking at the menu.

"Ma'am?" Angela looked at me and I dropped my gaze instantly, not wanting to meet her eyes. They were creepy with a capital 'C'.

"The same, thanks."

"The same?" Dean and Sam again harmonised in stereo and I shrugged. I was starving, having missed out on any kind of breakfast for fear of setting the stove on fire.

"I'll have a chicken salad and a diet Coke," Sam told her. Bobby glanced up from the tablet.

"Coffee and toast, thanks."

Cas shook his head and she finished writing the orders and left.

"What is it?" The angel said to me softly enough that Dean, sitting next to me, didn't hear it.

"Anything?" Sam asked Bobby.

"Nickel and dime stuff, nothin' weird," Bobby said distractedly.

I looked at Cas. "I don't know, probably nothing. She just gave me the creeps." I said to him, keeping my voice low as well.

"Basically a dead end," Bobby finished, looking over at me. "You sure about this place?"

"You read the script," I told him.

"I'll search the town," Cas said, frowning.

He stayed where he was and Dean lifted an eyebrow quizzically. "Cas, we can still see you."

"Yes, I am still here."

"Okay, well, you don't have to wait on us –"

"Something's wrong," the angel said after another moment.

"What? Are you stuck?" Dean asked, turning to look at him closely.

"I'm … blocked," Cas said, looking around the diner. "I'm powerless."

"You're joking?"

The angel shook his head uncomfortably. "There's something in the town, that's, uh, affecting me. I would assume it's her."

Dean exchanged a glance with Bobby, who nodded. "So what? Mom's making you limp?"

"Figuratively, yes," Cas admitted.

"Well, that's just great," Dean said, leaning back as the waitress returned to put a plate down in front of him, another in front of me, and Sam.

"I'll be back with your coffees in just a moment," she said, smiling at Dean.

"Right." He smiled back at her automatically, turning back to Cas when she'd left. "'Cause, without your power, you're basically a baby in a trenchcoat."

Cas looked away, his mouth tightening.

"Think you hurt his feelings," Sam said, watching him.

"Grow up," I blurted out, mostly to Dean. "If he's blocked, she's here and –"

"Got something," Bobby interrupted before I could get too worked up. Dean baiting Cas was something that he probably didn't have much control over, Bobby's silent warning look told me. Keeping the knowledge the brothers had of the angel under wraps was a strain.

"What is it?" Sam asked, leaning over Bobby's shoulder to look. "CDC?"

"For the rest of the class," Dean said, his voice clipped. I wasn't going to get away with ticking him off in front of the others.

"Dr Silver of Grants Pass called in an infection he couldn't identify to the CDC last night," Bobby read. "Patient name, Ed Bright."

"Got an address?"

"Yep," Bobby said, wiping the screen as the waitress returned with coffees, Sam's Coke and Bobby's toast.

"Eat fast," Sam said.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The clinic, when we got there, was shut up tight, the Closed sign on the door looking pretty final.

"What kind of doctor calls the CDC and then goes AWOL the very next day?" Dean said, looking disgruntedly at the door. "Let's have a look, shall we?"

He pulled out his picks and I turned away, looking up and down the street since we were kind of exposed standing there.

"What is it?" Cas asked, and I turned back to see Dean looking at something red smeared on his fingertip. His gaze lifted to a door at the end of the porch. More red was smeared around the handle. He walked over to it and pulled out his gun, knocking the butt against the flimsy padlock and breaking it open. Walking behind them, I saw the long, plastic-wrapped shape on the floor and took a step backwards as Dean reached down.

"Dean, don't," I said, my voice squeaking.

"Why not?" He looked up at me, hand poised over the wrapping.

"Because Eve's spreading a mutated virus around here and that's probably one of the victims," I snapped. He pulled his hand back hurriedly and stood up, pulling out his cell.

"You think it's Ed Bright?" Cas asked me as we walked back down to the street.

"Does it matter?" I looked around, glancing at my watch. "It's three-thirty on a week day afternoon and there are no kids playing around here," I told him, waving my hand at the clutter of bikes in the driveway opposite. "No one's driving down to the market or watering their garden or mowing their lawn."

"That indicates that things are not normal?" Cas looked around as well.

"Doesn't look normal to me," I muttered to him as Dean jerked his head.

"Sam's found Ed's house," he said. "Not far."

We followed him down the road and Cas hung back a little, walking beside me.

"Why have you stayed here?" he asked me, the furtive glance he threw at Dean's back telling me he didn't want Dean to hear this.

"I didn't have much of a choice," I said. "Bobby said he couldn't get hold of you and, um, they've been busy."

"Do you want to return to your own world?"

I looked down at the pavement, passing in a slight blur as we walked along it. _Did I?_ It wasn't what I'd thought it'd be, in a lot of ways. They weren't what I thought they'd be. I looked up and watched Dean, walking a few strides ahead of us. He was hard-edged and wired tight, and while I knew he hadn't been having a good year, I was beginning to wonder how long it would be before he broke.

"Can you do that?" I asked the angel, trying to buy some time to think about it.

"After we have resolved the current issue, yes, I would be able to do it."

I felt his gaze, on me, studying me. "It does not seem like a comfortable existence, where you are now," he added, another quick glance at the man in front of us seeming to confirm that he knew that the Winchesters weren't all that thrilled to have me around.

I licked my lips nervously, unsure of what to say. I hadn't leapt at the offer, didn't that tell me something? Something like…I didn't _want_ to leave?

We turned the corner and Sam and Bobby were standing by a car out the front of a big two storey frame house and I swallowed in relief that I didn't have to answer Cas straight away.

"The doc's house is intact, nothin' missin', car's in the drive but the whole family's gone," Bobby said, walking to meet us and handing Dean a photograph, the shine on it blocking my view of the image.

"Oh. So we've got a missing doctor and an oozy patient, huh?"

"Yeah. Plot thickens," Sam said, screwing up his nose.

"Well let's go see what Ed's roommates have to say," Dean suggested, turning for the house.

"Does Ed Bright have a brother?" Cas asked, looking at the windows.

"No, why?" Bobby looked at him.

"Then that's not his twin." Cas pointed at the window at the front.

"This one of the carbon copies the virus makes?"

"I don't know what we're looking at," Bobby said, watching the unsteady progress of the man in the window.

"Alright, Dean and me are gonna go in. You guys stay here and watch the door. If something comes out, shoot it," Sam told us decisively, pulling out the Taurus from under his jacket.

"Yeah. Best guess - silver bullets," Dean added, heading across the pavement to the steps.

"I'm fairly unpractised with firearms," Cas muttered to himself.

"You know who whines? Babies," Dean said over his shoulder.

"Wow, good hearing," Bobby said, tossing a shotgun to the angel and another to me. "Lock and load."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"What's takin' them so long?" Bobby complained after nothing happened for a minute or two.

"They're talking to one of the Eds," Cas said, eyes half-closed as he seemed to concentrate on the rooms.

"_One_ of the Eds?" Bobby asked, glancing at me.

"There are five. Four are dead – now all of them are dead," Cas confirmed, and the front door opened, Dean wiping his hands on his jeans a little obsessively as he came down the stairs, Sam following him, his face thoughtful.

"Girl in white hit the local bar," Dean said shortly, looking around for a car. "Said she kissed him and he doesn't remember much after that."

"Eve. Two bars in town," Bobby said, walking back to the car he'd boosted. It was a station wagon and the brothers got in the front, Bobby, Cas and I squeezing in the back. "One's on the highway heading out, the other's about five blocks down, past the town centre."

"We'll take the one in town," Dean decided, starting the engine.

He drove through the almost empty streets and we all saw the parking lot and neon signs, flashing dispiritedly in the sunshine. Pulling up in the lot outside the front entrance, both Winchesters looked over the vehicles that were still there, exchanging a look.

Lots of people had come here last night. Not many had left. That was clear enough.

The front door was open, and Dean pushed it wide, walking in, slowing a bit to let his eyes adjust to the dimness of the interior after the bright sunshine of the day.

Following him, Bobby's brows lifted as he looked around at the bodies that were, well, everywhere. "Well, the Sheriff's a mook, but still. You'd think he'd notice this many missing folks."

We spread out, looking cautiously at the dead. Most seemed to have died fighting each other, bite marks and puncture wounds were all over them, blood spattered and sprayed over the walls and floor, bodies lying on the bar, on the pool tables and draped untidily over the booths.

"We got a vamp over here," Dean said, using a handkerchief to lift the upper lip of the body in front of him. "Nope. Scratch that. We got a wraith. What the hell?" He looked at me. "These are the hybrids?"

"I think so," I said, looking around. "Ghouls have grey skin, don't they?"

"Grey, green, half-rotted," Dean said with a shrug, getting to his feet. "Why are they all dead?"

"Looks like they all burned up," Bobby said, kneeling beside another body, looking at the skin closely.

"Burned up, like?" Dean prompted him impatiently.

"Like a high fever, like the flu," Bobby said. "We need to check everywhere."

Dean looked around uneasily. "What the hell's going on here? Does every monster in this town have the Motaba virus?"

He waved a hand at me, pointing to the doorway beside the bar. "We'll take the store-rooms."

Sam looked around the room and back to Bobby. "Do we burn them or what?"

I'd just gotten through the doorway to the hall that led behind the bar and kitchen when I heard the doors bang open.

"Hands where I can see 'em!"

The shout resounded in the bar and I half-turned back, Dean suddenly beside me, slamming me into the corner, where the hall met an office, his hand over my mouth as he pressed us both into the shadow between the walls.

"Now this is not what it looks like," Cas said loudly.

"Right, look, we're the Feds." Bobby's voice was even louder.

"Yeah? Well Feds are not allowed to do this. Cuff 'em. Turn around," the first voice said sharply. "Check the back."

Dean looked down into my eyes and I heard the soft click as he eased the hammer back on the gun he held in his free hand. He pushed harder, his gaze cutting to the side and I tried to squeeze further into the corner, where the overhead lights couldn't reach, feeling my heart jack-rabbiting in my chest, my body twitching with the urge to run, as far and as fast as I could.

There was a scrape and rustle behind us, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when one of the monster deputies knocked over a couple of trash cans in the hall, the clanging of the metal bins bouncing from wall to wall. I suddenly realised why Dean had his hand over my mouth, because if it hadn't been there, I'd have screamed my head off, I was pretty darned sure of that.

"It's clean," a voice yelled from the other end of the corridor and the pressure from the man in front of me lessened a bit as we heard the doors close, the hall, then more distantly, the front door.

He could've stepped back then. Maybe nothing that happened later would've happened at all if he'd just taken a half-step back right then.

He didn't.

He lowered his gun hand and I heard him uncock it. His eyes met mine, and I became excruciatingly aware of the fact that I could feel just about every inch of his body, tightly pressed against mine, the outlines of bone and hard muscle through two sets of clothing. The smells of gun oil and more faintly whiskey, and more strongly, the blending of sweat and plain soap and some earthy scent I couldn't exactly define, making up the particular scent of the man against me, filled all the air in the little corner that we were standing in, and under normal circumstances, I might not have found it all that inspiring, but here and now it was the most intoxicating smell I'd ever been immersed in.

He peeled his palm off my mouth and he was still standing there, green eyes dark and filled with something I couldn't readily identify, the huff of his breath against my cheek, his pulse pounding clearly in the little dip at the base of his neck. Mine was doing the same thing.

I told you, I should've stayed in bed that day.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

* * *

I used to read a lot of romances, back when I was young and naïve about the ways of the world. One phrase had always leapt out at me in them, usually at the point that the hero and the heroine were staring at each other, each realising that for all the conflict and the denial they were putting themselves through, they did, in fact, have feelings for each other. It was about time – time slowing down, to be more specific. In real life, I'd never found that time did anything other than speed up when I'd been in the throes of a good crush, or falling in love, or whatever you wanted to call it.

But, at this moment, I had the feeling that time had indeed slowed right down, because it seemed to take hours between pulling in a breath, and letting it out again.

That over-stretched moment, where I could feel his heartbeat and just make out a slight tremble in his eyelashes where they were silhouetted against the light behind us, ended abruptly when he stepped back, tucking the gun under his coat, and looking down at the floor.

"Come on," he said, turning away without looking back at me, long legs striding down the hall and I ran after him, awkwardly and not with the full control of either my senses or my body, wondering what the hell had just happened, or if anything had at all.

The station wagon was still parked outside, but I grabbed his jacket sleeve as he leaned over to open the door, the idea popping into my head full-blown and in Technicolour when I saw the big truck sitting a few yards away.

"Look," I said, gesturing down the block. He straightened, turning to look and a slow grin spread over his face as he caught on without needing another word.

Both big Terminator fans, I guess.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Seatbelt on?" Dean asked me, putting his foot down on the accelerator and revving the crap out of the engine. I nodded and pressed back in the seat as he dropped the clutch and the truck lurched forward, heading straight for the brick front of the police station, the headlights showing the empty waiting room and counter through the plate glass windows, even in the afternoon sunshine.

If you've never been in a car accident, it's hard to describe what it feels like, especially one that's deliberate and involves driving head on into a building. It was loud. And hard on the body. Despite the fact that we were both ready for the impact, and the weight of the truck did most of the damage to the front of the building, Dean taking the nose through the glass doors, not the actual brick wall, I was thrown around like a rag-doll when we broke through and the whiplash was something awful.

"You alright?" he asked, flinging his door open as soon as we'd stopped, the smashed remains of the station's counter around the nose of the truck.

I nodded gingerly, undoing my seatbelt and forcing open the door, grabbing the strap of my leather bag as it I slid out of the cab and hit the floor with shaking knees. I wasn't sure my knees were going to be the same after today. They'd been shaken and stirred from both internal shocks and external ones for the last ten hours.

Dean was already over the pile of timber, formica and broken glass, heading for the now decidedly unlocked interior access door which was hanging in the doorway by one hinge when I clambered around the front of the truck and picked my way cautiously after him.

"Fire in the hole!" I heard his voice roar, and there was a blast in the corridor, smoke and dust pouring out of the broken doorway, followed by the loud retorts of the Colt handgun, several shots fired in quick succession.

"You alright?" I heard him say as I climbed through the doorway and saw the corridor behind it, pieces missing from the walls and three bodies lying in the mess, blood oozing from their chests.

In the cells at the end of the hall, Sam, Bobby and Cas were standing in a loose circle, Bobby shaking his head as he looked up and saw me. I saw his eyes widen suddenly, and with the experience of thousands of hours of watching tv and movies, I dropped to the floor like a pro, Dean spinning around and firing over my head.

"Dean! Wait!" Sam yelled, and I turned my head to see the Sheriff standing behind me, then a small black hole appearing in his stomach as Dean must have shifted his aim.

"Better have a good reason for that," he growled, striding up the corridor as I picked myself up from the floor and slamming the barrel of the gun against the Sheriff's temple.

"Need intel," Bobby said, gesturing to a more-or-less intact door between them. "Sheriff here seems like he might know what's going on."

Forcing the man – monster – along the hall, Dean shoved him into the interrogation room and pushed him down into a chair, handcuffing his hands behind the chair back.

"Well, I'll say this, you're the healthiest looking specimen I've seen all day," Bobby said as he came into the room.

"I take my vitamins," the Sheriff shot back.

"You wanna tell us what's going on here? You boys are, uh, Eve's cleaning crew, is that it?" He walked around the chair, his tone conversational. "You, uh - you come around to clean up the bodies? Make sure the word doesn't get out, huh? Is that why you snatched up the doctor?"

The Sheriff let out a long breath. "You're so wasting your time. Nothing more'n cattle in a feedlot."

Down the hall, there was the sound of something falling, and I stepped back as Sam and Dean both turned sharply toward it, their guns back in their hands, safeties off and hammers cocked in unison.

"Stay here," Dean said, a bit unnecessarily, I thought, since I wasn't armed and wouldn't have walked down there to see what was going on if you'd paid me. Cas didn't even take his eyes off the Sheriff.

Dean came back up the hall a minute later. "Go down, help Sam," he said brusquely, striding past me and dropping to his knees next to a dead deputy.

I walked slowly down the hall, hearing Sam's voice as I turned the corner.

"Look, we're not gonna hurt you. My name is Sam," he was saying and I walked up beside him, looking past him into the cell. Two boys sat there, one older, maybe nine or ten, the other one three or four years younger. They were handcuffed and gagged. On the floor, a bucket lay on its side. The source of the noise, I realised.

"This is Terry, she's with us," Sam continued, glancing over his shoulder as Dean came back, the deputy's keys unlocking the cell door.

"That's my brother, Dean," Sam kept talking, his voice low, reassuring. It never failed to amaze me how he could go from being the most trustworthy and nice guy ever, to being one of the most frightening men I'd ever seen, and back to Mr Nice Guy.

Dean pulled the gags from their mouths, his face stony but his hands gentle with them.

"Those cops, they're not coming back – ever," Sam told them, taking the gags and throwing them into the corner. "What are your names?"

"Joe," the oldest one said softly, looking down at his brother. "This is Ryan."

"Hey Ryan, how you doing?" Dean asked him quietly, sitting on the bunk beside him.

The boy looked down at his feet, moving a little closer to his brother.

"He won't talk, not since they came for us," Joe said, and the worry in his voice made all of us wince a little. Dean looked from Ryan back to Joe.

"Alright, listen Joe. We're gonna get you out of those handcuffs. Um, but you understand what's going on around here, don't you?"

Joe nodded, his eyes widening.

"Right," Dean continued. "So, first we've gotta make sure you're you."

"How can you do that?" he asked, and I got the feeling that the two of them had been living in a nightmare where no one had been themselves all day.

"Well there's a few, uh, dozen tests," Dean hedged as he stood up. "Okay, let's get started."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I'm going to blame the fuzziness that had been afflicting my brain function all day, plus the rollercoaster that had occurred just since we'd arrived in Grants Pass for the chronic error of forgetting a vital bit of information that I should've remembered from the minute I laid eyes on the boys.

It's not much of an excuse, but it's all I got. The thing was – is, I guess – that we'd been going on adrenalin for nearly four hours, and the boys looked so normal, and it was such a relief to find survivors that I don't think any of us thought much about it. But of course, it was why Cas had insisted that I come along.

We got to the interrogation room and Dean knocked against the open doorframe, looking at Bobby. "Got a couple of hungry human boys here."

Bobby looked at them for a moment, then nodded, turning back to the Sheriff.

"So you two never heard 'em talk... about a mother, or someone named Eve?" Sam was asking Joe as we walked along the corridor, picking our way through the demolition remains.

"It was just me and Ryan in there," Joe said, shaking his head.

"And your folks?" Dean asked over his shoulder, slowing as he came to the broken door.

"Cops said we were next," Joe told him, swallowing and looking down at the floor. "He said we were food."

The brothers exchanged expressionless looks. "You have any other family?"

"An uncle, in Merritt," Joe said. He started to shake a little and I pulled off my coat, putting it around his shoulders. Sam threw me a grateful look.

"Merritt, what's that, like fifteen miles outside of town?" Dean asked the boy and Joe nodded. "Okay. We'll get you there."

"Dean, can I have a word?" Castiel asked, reaching out to touch a sleeve. Dean stopped, looking at the angel. "We need to find Eve now."

"Yeah. Go. Me and Sam just gotta make a milk run," Dean said, and that's was a line I remembered reading.

"What?" Sam asked me, his forehead wrinkling up. "You remember something?"

"We need your help here," Cas said to Dean, his voice getting deeper and a little louder.

"Hold your water. We'll be back in a few," Dean told him, shrugging him off.

"Dean," Cas tried again, and he looked down the corridor at me. "Dean! Millions of lives are at stakes here, not just two. Stay focussed."

"Are you kidding?" Dean stopped on the other side of the doorway, holding the askew door aside for the boys to go under.

"There's a greater purpose here."

"You know what, I-I'm getting a little sick and tired of the greater purposes, okay? I think what I'd like to do now is save a couple of kids," Dean said coldly, jerking his head at Sam and I. "If you don't mind. We'll catch up."

At that, Cas looked at me and the memory popped back into my head. I don't know if he did it, or something in his face triggered it, but my stomach dropped and my throat closed up and I remembered.

"Dean."

He let out an impatient exhale as he looked at me. "What?"

"He's right," I said, wishing I didn't have to. I got the attention of both brothers. "Those boys, they're not human."

"They passed the tests!" Dean snapped at me. "You saw it."

I nodded. "But because Eve designed a trap," I told him, undoing the buckle on my bag, pulling out the folder. "I think, I'm pretty sure Joe's alright, but the little one …"

"Ryan!" Joe shouted from the other side of the wall and Dean swung around.

"What? What happened?"

"I don't know," Joe said plaintively. "He just took off."

"Crap!" Dean grabbed his shoulder, pushing him back inside the doorway at me. "Sam! C'mon. You stay here with him," he directed the last comment at me and I nodded, bundling the folder back into the bag as I put an arm around Joe. Cas looked at me and then at the bag, his face thoughtful.

"What's that?" he asked.

I looked up at him, wondering what the hell was going on. "You knew I'd know about them. How?"

"You know a lot of things you probably shouldn't know," he said, the dark blue eyes narrowing slightly. "But you're not a seer, nor a prophet."

"Of course not, I'm a script girl!" I told him bitterly, pushing Joe past him and up the hall to the next room.

"A script girl?"

The gunshot was very loud and not far and I pulled Joe close, wrapping my arms around him as he realised what it had meant.

"No, not Ryan?"

He looked over my shoulder as Sam and Dean came back through the doorway, seeing their faces, shuddering deeply.

"Sam, can you hotwire a car for me?" I asked Sam, turning slightly to look at him over Joe's head.

"Why?" Dean snapped at me, his temper threadbare. He'd been the one who'd pulled the trigger, I guessed.

"I can take Joe to his uncle's," I said, feeling a patch of wetness against my shoulder as Joe's tears started to leak out. "You can get on with taking her down."

Sam nodded. "Okay, come on."

He turned back and I followed him, walking past the angel. Dean's hand flicked out to grab my arm as I passed him.

"No stops, just straight there and straight back," he said, his voice hard. He pulled a handgun from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. "It's loaded with silver. Don't blow your head off."

It wasn't his Colt, but I'd seen it on the show a few times, a black Beretta 9mm, smaller and lighter than the big automatic he and Sam carried. I put it in my bag and nodded, walking past him. I had no idea of how to fire a gun. I hoped I wouldn't be tested with it today.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I found Bobby and Cas watching the diner forty minutes later. Joe hadn't turned on me, his uncle and aunt in Merritt had been shocked by what we'd told them, but relieved that Joe was alright, and I'd stopped for gas on the way out of town, thinking that running out would be about the last straw so far as I was concerned today.

I pulled over next to them and let the engine die, getting out and looking at Bobby.

"What's happening?"

"Boys went in five minutes ago," Bobby growled, his gaze glued to the light-edged closed blinds of the diner's windows. "We don't know more'n that."

The streetlights went out pretty much as he finished speaking and I could hear the pounding of boots on the pavement a second later.

"Down!" Bobby yelled and the shotgun went off, booming shot after shot, interspersed with the mechanical clank of the slide. I was flat on the sidewalk, staring at the weird strobing images of monsters flying backwards, more coming, lit up in seconds of the firing and fading to black again.

"Drop them and we won't hurt you," a voice shouted from the darkness. "Our orders are to take you in unharmed."

"Pig's eye, your orders," Bobby yelled, jerking the slide again and rewarded only by an empty click. "Balls!"

"Get up." I felt a hand close around my arm and I was yanked unceremoniously onto my feet and pushed toward the kerb, catching a glimpse of Bobby and Cas following, flanked to either side by more of the townsfolk who'd been turned. Or poisoned. Or infected. I couldn't work out what to call it really.

The man holding me pushed the door open and the bell jingled cheerfully above it. I squinted in the bright light, looking around. Sam and Dean were sitting at the counter, and I admit that my breath caught in my throat as I recognised Mary Winchester standing next to them. Eve, I thought. What a _bitch_ to use Mary's face and body. The place was full, dead-eyed, slack-faced monsters now, sitting in the booths and standing along the counter, covering every exit. I heard Bobby's soft mutter beside me.

"Well, so much for your plan B," Eve said to the Winchesters, then turned to Cas. "And you, wondering why so flaccid? I'm older than you, Castiel. I know what makes angels tick. Long as I'm around, consider yourself unplugged."

She looked back at Dean, mouth curving up in a smile. "Work for me. It's a good deal. Bonus, I won't kill your friends."

Dean was leaning on the counter, and he turned his head to look at her, his expression pure enough-with-the-bullcrap, a bit impatient as if he'd enough of monsters for one night. "Alright, look. The last few months we've been working for an evil dick. We're not about to sign up for an evil bitch. We don't work with demons. We don't work with monsters. And if that means you gotta kill us, then kill us!"

"Or, I turn you. And you do what I want anyway," Eve said softly, walking closer to him. I could see Sam's shoulders tightening as he prepared to move fast. I thought Bobby was tensing up beside me as well.

Dean looked away from her, staring at the board behind the counter. "Beat me with a wire hanger, answer's still no."

I froze. Next to Dean, Sam got to his feet, and the two monsters behind him gripped his arms and held him back.

This was _it_, I thought suddenly. It wasn't written down in the script but someone back home had seen it, seen it play out like this. Eve moved behind Dean, putting her hands on his shoulders and leaning against him, her cheek along his neck.

"Don't test me," she said quietly against his ear.

"Bite me."

And she did. Her hand pulled at the collar of his coat and shirt, and long fangs dropped in her mouth as she bit deeply into the side of his neck.

"No!" Sam shouted, struggling to get free.

"Dean!" Castiel called out at the same time, the monsters behind him dragging him back.

Eve released him, her eyes a bit unfocussed as she staggered back, coughing.

"Phoenix ash," Dean said in explanation, half-turning on the seat, his expression unsmiling but still satisfied as hell, his hand pressed hard against the wound in his neck

Something dark and liquid dripped from her mouth as she stared at him, then I could see her ribs, lit up from inside as a light burned, stronger and stronger. Dean backed into Sam and the monsters holding his brother and watched her.

"One shell, one ounce of whisky. Down the hatch. Little musty on the afterburn," he said, smiling now, except in his eyes. They were cold. And hard.

"Call you later, Mom."

Mary bent over double, holding her stomach and then she disappeared and the waitress who might once have been called Angela was there instead. I couldn't help but wonder how the heck the special effects people were going to manage this, her veins were black, lifting against the skin of her face and chest and arms and she coughed again, black liquid spilling out of her mouth and nose. I couldn't see Dean's face, but I saw him hunch down, as if in pain, and I thought of the monsters in the bar, with fangs and spikes and the mottled skin of ghouls. He was being turned by the poison she'd given him, even as she'd drunk the poison he'd had inside.

Eve fell to the floor, her eyes open and staring at nothing, the greenish-black liquid covering her face and the light inside her still burning. Cas wrenched free of the arms holding him, looking from Bobby to Dean.

"Shut your eyes!" he shouted and I shut mine, screwing them up tight and dropping to my knees as a blast of light brighter than the sun filled the diner.

When my eyelids went dark again, I opened one eye and looked around. Every monster in the place was dead. Sam, Bobby and Cas were standing, looking at them. I opened the other eye and got to my feet.

"We _got_ to take you on more monster hunts," Bobby said.

"Hey Cas, um, Dean's bleeding pretty good," Sam said to the angel, gesturing at his brother who was leaning against the counter, his face scrunched up with pain.

"Yeah, I think she turned me into one of Terry's hybrid monsters," he said, half-smiling at the thought. "Could you clear that up too?"

Castiel walked past Eve and touched him lightly and he lowered the bandana he'd been holding against the hole in his neck, looking at it. There was no hole. No blood, not even on the cloth or on his hand.

"Alright, we're good."

Bobby looked at me. "Some goddamned back up plan."

Dean's gaze rested on me for a second, then he grinned at Bobby. "Hey, it worked, didn't it?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby's living room never looked so good as it did in the moment that Cas deposited us back there. I walked to the sofa and just collapsed on it, looking around with a sense of peace that I don't think I'd ever felt for a place. I didn't look too closely at the word that sprang into my mind, but I felt it.

"So what do you think?" Sam said, looking at Dean. "You think she was telling the truth?"

Dean licked his lips, looking away. "Hard to believe."

"The truth about what?" Cas looked from Sam to Dean, frowning. "Did I miss something else?"

"Eve said that Crowley's still kicking," Dean said, rubbing a hand along his jaw and down the side of the neck, as if he could still feel the bite.

Cas looked at him in bewilderment. "But - I burned his bones, how c-? Was she certain?"

"Sounded pretty sure," he said, glancing at his brother. "According to her, Crowley's still waterboarding her kids, somewhere."

"I don't understand."

I kept my gaze firmly locked on the bag on my lap, willing no one there to notice me. This was it too, I thought. This was where Dean was going to have to face the things he really didn't want to.

"Well, he is a crafty son of a bitch," he said, shrugging slightly.

"I'm an angel. I'll look into it immediately," Cas said, his expression becoming determined. There was the faint sound of beating wings and he was gone.

Dean looked over at me. "Don't pretend you didn't hear that, Dorothy, he sounded like he had no idea of what we were talking about."

I looked at him, hoping my face was expressionless. Everything else had happened, the way the scripts had said. Well, mostly.

"Fact is, Dean, he's an angel. And angels don't make mistakes like that, unless…" Bobby let the words trail away.

"Unless what?" Dean asked him tightly.

"Unless they want to," Sam said. "You just killed Eve, the Mother of All, because Terry had the solution in that folder, in those scripts. You're not telling me that you think this is off, now?"

Dean looked at me again, and I looked down at the leather folder on my lap.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" he asked, getting up and going to the door. I nodded, getting up, still holding onto the folder.

"Don't need that," he said shortly, his eyes on the folder. "Just want to ask you about something."

"Dean," Sam said, his voice soft and questioning.

"Not in the mood for sharing, Sammy," Dean said brightly, standing back as I walked past him. "Kind of a private matter," he added, his mouth curling up on one side.

He turned around and gestured to the stairs, and I walked up them in front of them, wondering if he wanted to ask about another event in his life. To be honest, I didn't mind recounting the events I'd seen on the show, but I was nervous about his reactions, because sooner or later he was going to ask about something really painful, and I wasn't sure I could watch that.

"Your room," he said, and I kept walking down the hall, opening the door and going in.

"What?" I stopped by the bed and turned around.

"Did Cas want you along because you knew about those kids?" he asked, and that took me by surprise.

"I think so," I told him, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"How'd he know that you'd back him up on that?" He walked past me to lean against the chest of drawers.

"I don't know," I said. "I honestly don't. I asked him about it, but then I had to take Joe to his family and there was no time when I got back."

"Was he alright? The kid?"

"No," I said, exhaling sharply. "His family were nice. They'll look after him."

"How come you didn't remember about the boys?" Dean asked, his eyes shadowed.

I gestured helplessly. "The painkillers I took last night knocked me around most of the day," I said, looking down at my hands which were folded together in my lap. "I wasn't functioning at my best. I'm sorry, I know that sounds like the world's lamest excuse but I - I just didn't remember until it was happening."

I looked up then, seeing him watching me, his face stony. He nodded after a moment and rubbed his hand along the dark line of his jaw.

"But you're a hundred percent sure Cas is doing business with Crowley?"

"Yes," I said, looking back up at him. "_That_ I'm a hundred percent sure about."

He slouched back a bit more against the chest, arms folded over his chest as he looked down at the floor.

"When Sam started having visions," he said, slowly, not looking up. "He saw our old house, in Lawrence."

I nodded, wondering what part of that episode he was going to ask about. I loved it, and I'd watched it a lot of times. It was the first time Dean really showed his vulnerability. And it was very reminiscent of _Poltergeist_, with Missouri's matter-of-fact psychic explanations.

"We stopped at a gas station, on the way," he continued, and his head lifted to look at me. "Do you know what I did there?"

"You told Sam you were going to the bathroom and you called your father," I answered promptly. "He didn't pick up and you had to leave a message."

He exhaled heavily, looking down again, the slump of his shoulders telling me he'd really hoped I wouldn't know that.

"I'm…sorry I know this stuff about you," I said tentatively, not sure of why I was apologising, exactly. I'd thought it was just fiction when I'd watched it. Absorbing, addictive, heart-aching fiction.

He looked up and then away, shrugging. "Not your fault, you didn't know it was real."

"I didn't know what the hell I was doing, back then," he said quietly. "Still don't. Doesn't seem to matter what we do – or don't do – we get forced into these corners and everything goes to hell, people die."

I wasn't sure of what I could say to that.

"Uh, Terry," he said, and I looked at him, a bit surprised by the ill-ease I could see in his expression.

"What?"

"About, uh, what happened, before," he said, his shoulders hunching up a bit now. "Sam, um, Sam's still got…uh…well, Cas didn't remove any of his memories from when you and he were, uh, you know, and…um…"

I had even less idea of what I could say in answer to the rambling he was doing. My pulse had accelerated at the thought that he'd felt – if not the same thing – then something, at least – in that moment in the back hallway of the bar. It'd gotten even faster at the thought that he was trying to…what?...apologise?...explain?...for why he wasn't going to do anything further about it? I didn't know and I didn't want to know, to be honest. Like I said, it would've been a good day to have not left the comfort and safety of my bed.

"Sure," I said quickly, trying to stop him from saying anything else. "Right. Of course."

I didn't really know what I was saying, or even what he was trying to say but it seemed to satisfy him. More-or-less. He opened his mouth to say something else and closed it again, and I felt a wave of pure relief wash through me.

"Well, I guess we should see what Bobby's rustled up for dinner," he said instead, pushing himself off my bureau and heading for the door, slowing as he realised I was still sitting there. "You coming?"

"Uh, I'm not really that hungry," I said. "I'll just crash early tonight."

"Okay," he said, going out and closing the door behind him.

I was starving, but I couldn't go downstairs and act normal now. Focus on what's important, I told myself firmly. Eve might be dead but Crowley was still looking for a way into Purgatory. I realised I'd left the folder down in the living room and grimaced. I wasn't that tired either, but my whole body was a mass of aches and pains, from the top of my head to the back of my heels and going through the next script would've helped a bit with taking my mind off that.

_Hot bath_, I thought. It would take up time, get rid of a lot of the aches and maybe I could sneak downstairs later and grab the folder. I got up and went to the bathroom, turning on the taps and running the hot water.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The bath had helped and the three men were sitting in the dining room, talking, when I snuck down the stairs just after midnight to get the folder. It was still sitting on the sofa where I'd left it, and I managed to get it and my bag and get back up the stairs without any of them being the wiser.

_The Man Who Would Be King_ was the title of the next episode, and it was a mostly Cas viewpoint episode. The prologue had been written out, pretty much in full, detailing Cas' time as invisible watcher over humanity from before life had crawled out of the sea to the present day – or at least till he'd been ordered to save the soul of Dean Winchester from Hell.

Dean had read it through, and I had a feeling that on a second reading, he'd be more inclined to believe the angel's memories of leaving him in Cicero and making a deal with Crowley instead of asking for help. It was still going to hurt like heck.

The script's detail stopped after the prologue. Dean, Sam and Bobby are trying to find Crowley's headquarters without alerting Cas and they're hunting demons who are possessing hunters. And Cas is spying on them while they do it. What might help were the Enochian warding symbols. I tried to remember if Cas had shown them how to hide from angel view in the episodes or seasons before and I slapped my forehead when I realised that they should've been completely warded – unless Cas' healing of Dean and his retrieval of Sam's body from Hell had wiped the markings from their ribs. But there was a record of it anyway.

I pushed the covers aside and pulled my robe over my pajamas, stuffing the notes and scripts back into the folder and tucking it under my arm. If he'd kept the x-rays, I thought, opening the door and hurrying out into the hall, we'd have the ideal way to keep the angel from spying.

The house was dark, but there was a golden glow from the living room as I came to the top of the stairs and I hurried down, hand sliding down the banister rail to keep myself from tripping on the edge of the robe. It'd been a really long day and I didn't want to wake anyone who was sleeping.

It was Sam who was up, and he looked at me as I came into the room, forehead creasing up in that all-too familiar quizzical look.

"Dean said you went to bed hours ago," he said, as I came into the room.

"I did," I told him, sitting on the sofa and dumping the folder there. "I just couldn't sleep."

"What's going on?"

"In season–uh, last year, when Bobby was in the hospital and Cas lost his power, Dean had x-rays of the markings Cas put on your ribs," I said. He nodded, remembering it, his mouth curving up a bit at the fact that I did too. "Do you know where they are? Did he keep them?"

"I think they're in the car," Sam said, frowning as he tried to remember. "Pretty sure they're in the car."

"Do you have the keys?"

He snorted. "Are you kidding? No, he's got 'em."

Of course. "Never mind, it'll be okay in the morning," I said, half to myself.

"Why do you want them?" he asked.

"Those markings are wards against angels being able to see you," I reminded him and his eyes widened as he followed that train of thought to its conclusion.

"We can protect ourselves," he said softly, smiling. "Nice job."

I looked down, shrugging modestly. "I was reading over the next script. Cas is definitely spying on you from here on in," I said. "Most of the time, you'll probably have to live with that, but I thought, maybe if we could make the wards like he did, you could protected for part of the time, without arousing his suspicion."

"You know us pretty well," he said, looking at me intently. "Pretty damned well."

"I sometimes wish I didn't," I told him honestly. "It feels like I've been spying on you."

"That wasn't your fault," he said, his voice softening. "It's not like you put video cameras in our house."

I shrugged. "It might as well have been like that." I pulled in a deep breath.

"You saw me with Ruby, didn't you?" he asked, his gaze dropping to the desk he sat behind. "Saw me drinking the blood, killing that nurse...killing Lilith?"

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

* * *

I nodded, uneasy about where he wanted to go with that. "I saw why you did it, too," I said quickly, looking at him. "Saw Dean killed, his soul taken to Hell, and saw how you tried so hard to stop it from happening."

He smiled, but there wasn't a speck of humour in it. "Failed, you mean. Failed him, not just once, but over and over."

"No, Sam," I said, leaning forward to look at him carefully. If I could stop this endless cycle of guilt now, even if just for Sam, maybe that was the reason I was here, not some hidden angel plot to confuse and stir things up even more. "You _know_ that Heaven and Hell made sure that Dean made the deal, because they needed the first seal broken. There wasn't anything you could've done about that."

He laughed then. "Oh, Terry, that's – that's a nice thing to say, but we both know that's not true. I could've done any number of things differently, could've been what he wanted me to be and not kidded myself that what I was doing, with Ruby, was anything but…arrogance."

I didn't know what to say to him in the face of the aching self-loathing I could hear in his voice.

"You thought you were doing the right thing," I offered.

"Yeah," Sam huffed. "But good intentions don't pave the road to Heaven."

He had his answers down pat, almost as if the conversation was one that he'd practising for. Maybe he had been, I thought uncomfortably. Practising for telling this to his brother. He'd apologised to Dean, a lot of times since they'd been saved from the convent, but Dean couldn't hear it, couldn't see past what Sam had _done_, specifically, I thought, to their family.

"Did you see what I did when Cas pulled me out, without my soul?" he asked, his voice so quiet that I could hardly hear him.

"Some of it," I told him. "The, uh, hunt in Rhode Island, with Samuel."

He nodded, looking away and his mouth curled down. "You'd have to know me really well to be able to sit in the same room as me, knowing that."

"Sam." I got up, walked over to the desk, forcing him to look at me. "I _do_ know you, probably better than I should. You can't look at those things in isolation. They weren't decisions made in isolation. There wasn't any time to–"

"Don't –" He shook his head. "Don't do that, okay? Dean does that, overlooks what I've done, pretends it didn't – pretends it's in the past, over and done."

"Isn't it?"

"It doesn't feel like that," he said, his eyes cutting away from me again. "I thought…I thought that I'd paid for it all, going down there, taking the devil back to the cage. But I haven't. I don't remember it, so how can I have paid?"

There wasn't a great deal I could really say to that either. I didn't know either of them well enough to give them insights into each other. "Maybe paying isn't what you do, maybe you're looking for some kind of…" _What_, I wondered? _Way to make amends? Make it better?_ "…some kind of way to make things better, the way you're feeling?"

His head snapped around to look at me and his eyes were narrowed in thought. "You might be right," he said in a tone I didn't like at all. "Maybe that's it. The way past…everything."

He leaned across the desk and gripped both of my hands, smiling at me. "Thanks."

"For what?" I asked, feeling very uncomfortable. I hadn't said anything really useful.

"For listening, to start with," Sam said, shrugging. "And for not looking at me as if I'm a monster."

"You're not a monster," I said, able to be honest about that. "Any more than your brother is. You both think that you have the capacity to become that, but," I added, shaking my head. "it's not really possible. Not for either of you."

"What makes you so sure about that?"

"You care too much," I told him, and the clarity of that thought hit me for the first time. I'd watched the episodes, over and over and over again, for years now. I knew the lines, knew the expressions, knew the details of every hunt, every monster, every argument and the brief moments of peace between the two of them. I didn't know how accurate those times had been, from the show, but I knew them inside and out. It was still the first time I'd thought about what really drove them, to do what they did, to feel the way they did, about each other, about themselves as well.

"Both of you care too much – about other people, and about each other." I hoped I was right about this, but it felt right, you know? It felt like it was the key to both of them. "Monsters don't. Demons don't. Angels don't."

Sam sucked the edge of his lip in between his teeth, chewing on it absently as he looked at me. "Dean's disappointed, in me. In what I've done."

"I don't think he is, Sam," I said, glancing involuntarily to the doorway, as if his name was somehow going to conjure him up. I could just imagine his reaction to this kind of conversation. "I think he thinks that he raised you, and he didn't do it properly."

Sam let go of my hands, his forehead creasing up as he looked at me. "He was a kid."

"You don't have to tell me that," I told him. "And I don't know for sure, alright? But I get the feeling that he blames himself for what happened to you, maybe not the demon blood, but everything afterward."

"It wasn't his fault, it was Dad's," Sam sputtered. "Pushing us, keeping us on the move all the time, putting all the responsibility onto Dean –"

"You should be talking with him about it, you know."

"I can't," he said. "He won't."

I thought about what we were coming up to, Cas admitting his betrayal. "He put a lot of faith in Cas, you know. He's going to need someone to lean on when Cas admits what he's been doing."

"I know."

"It might be a start, to get back to trusting each other again," I suggested.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby looked up at the lightbox he'd screwed into the wall. Dean's x-rays were clear on it, the marks a lighter grey against the ribs.

"The whole house?" he asked, turning around to look at Dean.

Dean shook his head. "That'll make him wonder. Just the panic room to start with, someplace we can talk without being overhead, or watched."

"Not the car?" Sam asked him.

"No, he'll definitely be suspicious if he can't jump in and out of that," Dean said with a grimace. "He popped in on me on the way back from Laramie."

Sam and Bobby looked at him.

"What did you tell him?" Bobby asked. Dean shook his head.

"Nothing, alright? Told him I was meeting up with Sam, in Omaha."

"He didn't suspect anything?" Sam asked and I got a shiver up my spine.

"Not yet," I cut Dean's answer off. "But we have to do this fast, because I think we're out of time."

"Gotta lead from Kenny an hour ago. He found what we're lookin' for and he's got him on ice at his place," Bobby said, scratching his beard. "We should get going." He looked at me. "You can handle these sigils?"

I nodded. "Do they have to be in blood or will paint do?"

Dean snorted into his coffee then tipped the rest of the contents of the cup down his throat. "Paint'll do, Dorothy."

They picked up the big canvas duffles and got into the cars, engines rumbling as they pulled out of the yard and a minute later the place was silent again.

I wondered if Cas had been here, watching and listening. The script was too vague on the matter to work out where and when the angel had access, just a series of notes and ideas for dialogue and a few rough descriptions filling the in-between times. Picking up the notepad and a pen, I looked down at the lightbox and started copying out the symbols that had been engraved on Dean's ribs, checking for repetitions.

The conversation with Sam kept coming back to me. I don't think it'd escaped too many fans of the show that the much-loved bond between the brothers had deteriorated into a series of lies and secrets, neither able to trust the other, or themselves, it seemed, half the time. They'd spent as much time fighting each other as they had fighting the powers of evil, or being miserable because they felt so isolated from everyone and everything.

Frowning, I thought back to the first season – 2005 in this world, and in my own – and realised that the deterioration had begun back then, and for Dean and Sam, before that as well, when Sam had left for college. Dean might've had a good reason for trying to keep the fears he'd had about Sam buried, and Sam hadn't been able to face looking weak about Jess' loss to his brother, but they'd been hiding things even back then, and it'd only gotten worse over the years.

I looked at the leather folder, with its bundles of secrets from the past episodes and its rough blueprint for the disasters of the future ones. Everything I changed here, was going to change their lives exponentially into the future. The trouble was, for all the glimpses these outlines gave, none of them could tell me how that was going to look.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I was making notes from the vague outline of the next script when I heard a rustle of wings in the room. If that wasn't a giant pigeon, I thought worriedly, I was in trouble.

"Why are you doing this?" a roughened voice said behind me, and I turned around to see the angel, looking tired and strained and grubby.

"Doing what?"

"You told them I was – in league – with Crowley," he accused, walking toward me.

You might've already noticed that bravery is not one of my strengths. I hastily got up and skittered around the table, keeping it in between us. No idea what I thought that would do, since he could've annihilated me from New Jersey just as easily as across the table. But you know, not always thinking logically at times like these.

"Opening Purgatory is a huge mistake, Castiel," I said, looking at him. He was distraught, I could see that. I wondered exactly what he'd overhead when he'd been spying on them.

"I don't have a choice!"

"There's always a choice," I snapped back, doing a small double-take in my head when I realised how much that'd sounded like Dean. "Why didn't you tell Dean that Sam wasn't in Hell? Why didn't you ask him for help?"

"He'd done enough, he deserved to get what he wanted," Cas ground out, looking at the table top between us.

"He didn't _want_ a life of misery and grief thinking Sam was being tortured every day," I told him. "He didn't _want_ to be betrayed by his best friend."

At that, Cas looked up, an almost wistful look on his face. It disappeared and he frowned at me. "If I am not strong enough to defeat Raphael, he will free Lucifer and the whole apocalypse will begin again – or he will take Lucifer's place and start the Second War and bring that down to earth."

I shook my head. "You're going to do worse."

"How do you know that?" He looked at me, and this time I could see the confusion in his eyes. "Where are you getting this information?"

I'm normally a pretty honest person, but there was something, some little voice at the back of my mind that told me I needed to keep the whole Winchester-tv-show-scripts-about-the-future thing under my hat.

"I sometimes have dreams," I told him, hoping that would be vague enough to pass and that he wasn't going to question it. He'd been right, before. I wasn't a seer and I sure as heck wasn't a prophet.

"What kind of dreams?" he asked.

"Weird ones," I said. "Sometimes, some parts of them come true."

"You had dreams about Crowley and I?"

I nodded. The fine art of lying well involves telling someone no more than a basic unverifiable fact. Trying to dress it up invariably ended up in a mess. In fact, the less you actually say, the more likely you are to be believed.

"Why would they believe you?"

"I don't think they really did, until Eve confirmed that you didn't kill Crowley," I said, weaving in a little bit of truth. "You must have known I could see a bit of what's happening," I added, thinking of his behaviour in Grants Pass. "You knew I would argue against Dean taking those boys to their family."

"I can't see you clearly," he said, plainly bewildered by that. "Perhaps because you're from an alternative existence, or perhaps because of something else."

_What else was there_, I wondered worriedly, but didn't get a chance to ask. His head snapped up, his eyes going wide.

"Crowley!"

He disappeared and the papers on the table fluttered.

For a moment, I couldn't remember what Crowley had done, then I did. Demon attack on Bobby and the Winchesters – and Cas saves them.

I looked down at the script and realised that Crowley would make his move on Lisa and Ben very soon now. Maybe as soon as he freed Cas. Picking up the phone, I dialled Dean's number, which of course went straight to voicemail.

"Dean, I think Crowley's getting close to kidnapping Lisa and Ben to stop you from trying to find him. You need to – dammit!" I looked down at the phone in annoyance as the message time ran out. Well, he'd know what to do about it, I thought.

If Crowley had no leverage against them, would Balthazar still help them find the disused warehouse that the demon was using to torture the information out the monsters?

I sat down again and went through all the notes I had on the end of the season. There were dozens of locations but none of them were any use, being for physical locations in and around Vancouver that would be substituting for American towns and buildings. I was skimming through the notes for the next episode, the one where Crowley does kidnap Lisa and Ben when the name leapt out at me.

_Lovecraft._

If you've dabbled at all in reading fiction in the genres of horror, gothic and the supernatural, chances are, you've read at least one of his stories. He didn't really give a damn about humanity, and that's what made his stories so creepy. There were a million rumours about him and the circle of friends he made and he wrote a book that was supposed to be a fictional magical text on spells and lore, particularly, spells for opening doorways into other dimensions, the notes on the script said. In my world, maybe it _had_ been fictional. In this world, I wasn't nearly as sure of that.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby came in, followed by Sam, both of them looking tired. They perked up a bit at the smells from the kitchen, and ate fast and hungrily when the dinner I'd made a couple of hours earlier was served out. I was making a lot of casseroles.

"Dean's gone to Michigan," Sam said, between mouthfuls. "He thinks they'll be here by morning."

"Cas was here," I told them, getting both of their attention immediately. "He wanted to know how I was helping you."

"What'd you tell him?" Bobby asked, putting his fork down.

"Not much. I said I was having dreams, and then he disappeared," I said, pushing my food around the plate. I'd been hungry when I'd started to make it. In the last fifteen minutes, my appetite had disappeared completely. "To rescue you guys, I guess."

Sam nodded. "He showed up and we trapped him in the holy oil circle," he said, mopping his plate with a slice of bread. "Then the demons came and we were just leaving when Dean got your message."

"Will they be safe here?" I asked Bobby. "When he left, I did the rest of the house using the sigils."

Bobby shrugged. "We got demon traps and angel wardings, hex bags and salt and iron. Can't make it any safer."

"What'd you find out on Lovecraft?" he added, picking up his plate and taking it to the sink.

"Not much more than what I knew," I said. "Someone who really knows the lore here needs to go through your library, Bobby."

"I gotta journal, one of the Campbells, I think," he said, turning back to the dining room. "I'm sure there was something in that about ol' Howard Phil, but I'll have to dig it out." He pulled out his mobile. "In the meantime, there's someone else who might have a clue."

"Dr Visyak?"

He looked up in surprise and under the shadow of his cap, he frowned at me. "Whaddya know about her?"

"Just what I saw in the dragon episode," I said, fiercely repressing the urge to smile when I caught Sam's eye. Obviously, Dean'd told him about the previous relationship as well. "But there's a notation at the end of the next script that Castiel finds her and takes her, so I'm thinking she's a bit more than a medieval studies professor?"

"You two hold down the fort," Bobby said instantly, shoving his phone into his pocket and swinging back to the hallway. Sam got to his feet and followed him out.

"What the – Bobby, where are you going?" he called out as I scrambled out of the chair and followed him.

"Dean ain't the only one with connections," Bobby said, dragging his jacket on and checking the pocket for the car keys. "I'll be back when I get her."

He opened the front door and slammed it shut behind him and after a moment, we heard the sound of the Nova coughing into life, throwing gravel as it sped out of the yard.

"Great!" Sam turned back to me, running a hand through his hair and pushing it back from his face. "Did you see that coming?"

I looked away. I hadn't. Bobby did go to see her but it was a just scene marked up for a location – a small cabin in the woods – and nothing else.

"Bobby's collection of hunters' journals is in the living room," I said, jerking my head toward the room's double-sliding doors. "We may as well see if we can find the references."

He followed me into the room, and over to the shelves, and I passed him an armful of thick card or leather-bound, hand-stitched books from the section. Sitting on the sofa and armchair respectively, we started to read. After a moment, I realised that Sam was looking uncomfortable, restlessly flicking through the pages instead of concentrating.

"What?" I asked him. "Is something wrong?"

He looked up and to my surprise a hint of colour started rising in his face. "Nothing, it's – sorry, it just feels like, uh, it feels a bit like, um, well," he sighed deeply and put the journal down on the sofa beside him. "This is, it's reminding me a bit of the, the, uh, you know, the other, um, timeline."

_Uh huh_, I thought. "I don't want to make it worse, but really, Sam, what was it about me in that life that you liked so much?"

He looked away, smiling slightly. "You were together, I guess. You handled stuff, you were brave and, I, uh, I could talk to you, about anything," he said, shrugging. "You stood up to Dean. You made – um, you made us a home."

I frowned at him, totally unable to imagine myself being or doing any of those things. "You mean, everything I'm not, in this life? How on earth did we meet?"

His forehead wrinkled up as he looked back. "You were researching supernatural mythology at UCLA. We had a case and we couldn't figure out the parameters of the attacks. You didn't know it was for real, but you got all the information you could find and it worked out," he told me. "You saved our asses on that one."

"Sam…," I said, shaking my head at that unlikely view of me. "That's all really flattering, and don't get me wrong, I'm quite enjoying hearing it, but come on, that doesn't sound like me, does it? A college researcher? I almost flunked out of high school. And have you seen me standing up to your brother? Even once?"

"Well, maybe, you know, you'll get more used to it here and relax into it," he said, and I wondered if he really thought that.

"Maybe," I hesitated, looking at him doubtfully. "But I'm not – I'm not like that. I mean, on the most fundamental of levels, I don't think anyone would consider me brave – or able to hold it together enough to save anyone."

He leaned back, his expression thoughtful as he looked at me. "You never know until it happens."

"You gonna wish that on me? In the middle of all this?" I said, hoping to lighten the conversation and get a smile. I did. He smiled, I mean. I got the feeling that it wasn't the last conversation I'd have with him about this, though.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We were still up, reading through the journals, when the unmistakable rumble of Impala pulling into the yard and stopping outside the house made Sam glance up.

"Think they'll want something to eat? Or just crash out?" I asked him. He shook his head.

"Wait and see."

The front door opened.

"Uh, there's a bedroom free upstairs," Dean's voice came from the hall as the door shut. "Come on."

We heard the sounds of them going up the stairs and I got up, walking back to the kitchen and turning on the oven. Sam and I'd made a deep-dish lasagne for dinner and there was more than half left over.

"You guys still up?" Dean said, leaning into the dining room doorway.

"Sam's in the living room," I told him, waving a hand at the stove. "There's lasagne if you guys are hungry?"

"Yeah," he said, tossing the confirmation out as he was already turning to see his brother. "Uh, Lise, that's Terry," he added, as Lisa took a couple of steps into the dining room. "Terry, Lisa and Ben."

"Hi," I said. They both looked tired and a bit scared, which I thought was fair enough considering Dean had just snatched them from their home and life, probably without much of an explanation. "This should be hot in a few minutes."

"Um, hi, thanks," Lisa said, walking into the room a bit further, her head turning to watch Dean as he crossed the hall to the other room. "Sorry for the invasion."

"No need to apologise to me, it's not my house," I said cheerfully. "Have a seat; do you want a coffee or anything? Hot chocolate?" I looked at Ben who nodded, his gaze on the floor.

"Do you know how long we're supposed to be staying here?" Lisa sat down at the table, and Ben sat beside her.

"Until Crowley's contained, I guess," I told her. It was all a bit vague. I wasn't even sure that they could contain Crowley, but Dean would want them to be safe until the Purgatory issue was resolved, one way or the other.

"Who's Crowley?"

_Oh. Awkward_. I kicked myself mentally for the slip. "Um, one of the bad guys. What'd Dean say?"

"He said we were in danger and we had to leave," she said, glancing back at the dining room doorway. "And that was it, we had five minutes to pack a bag and we were on our way."

"It's a complicated situation," I hedged, hoping that the brothers would make an appearance soon, before I put my foot in it any deeper. "I'm sure Dean'll explain it as soon as he can."

The coffee was hot and fresh and I finished heating some milk for Ben's hot chocolate, pouring it into a cup and adding a marshmallow from the pack I'd bought just for that purpose. I love it that way and if you can't indulge in the little things, there's not much point to living at all.

"Here," I said, setting down the cups in front of them. "Food's coming up."

"Uh, are you a friend of Bobby's?" Lisa asked as I turned away.

"Sort of," I said, having no real clue of what else to say on the matter of my living there. It occurred to me that I wasn't really a friend of any of them.

Dean and Sam choose that moment to walk in and I scurried thankfully back to the stove. I hadn't really thought through how much they knew or what Dean would tell them about the situations, both theirs and the one here. The impression I'd gotten from the very small amount we'd seen of Dean's life in Cicero had been that he hadn't told them much about his life, trying to start fresh. I didn't know if that was right, for this world.

"Where's Bobby?" Dean asked, looking around the room.

"He went to get Dr Visyak," Sam told him, smiling at Lisa and Ben as he sat down on the opposite side of the table. "You two must be exhausted."

"Getting there," Lisa acknowledged, putting her arm around her son. "Dean, you said you'd explain when we got here."

He gave Sam a hunted look and sat down at the table. "We got word that you two were in danger. You can stay here until we sort it out," he said, and it was obvious even that paltry offering was delivered reluctantly.

Lisa plainly thought so. "What kind of danger? From who?" She glanced at me. "This Crowley person?"

I had my back to him, but I felt the glare from the dining room anyway, hunching up a little bit as I checked the temperature of the slowly heating lasagne.

"Don't worry about Crowley, we've got him covered," he said to Lisa. "It's just gonna be safer if you stay here, okay? This is what I do," he added, glancing at Sam. "What we do. You know that."

"For how long?" she asked, looking down at Ben. "We can't stay here indefinitely."

"It won't be long," Sam said reassuringly, lying through his teeth. "A couple of weeks, maybe."

"Weeks?"

"Yeah," Dean admitted, not looking at her. "No more than two."

The food was heated all the way through and I was glad that I had something to do with myself, because the silence at the table was so thick you could've cut it with a knife. I cut slices from the dish and served them onto plates, carrying the plates to Lisa and Ben first, then putting one in front of Dean, not looking at anyone on my back-and-forth trips.

The fact that neither brother talked about the research we'd done on the journals, or about Bobby racing off to get his doctor friend, or about Cas or Crowley, told me enough about what Dean had and had not shared with Lisa over the time he'd lived with them. Had he been successful, I wondered? Pretending to be normal? I didn't think I'd get the chance to ask that – ever.

When they'd finished the food, Dean looked at her, and then at Ben. She took the hint and they got up, excusing themselves to go upstairs. I watched the brothers listening to their progress up the stairs and along the hall, both relaxing unconsciously with the sound of the closing bedroom door.

"So what'd you find out?" Dean looked at Sam, one eyebrow raised.

"One of the Campbells got involved with a murder spree in 1937," Sam said, leaning back in his chair. "Started with H.P. Lovecraft and something went right through his circle of friends."

"Lovecraft had written a book," I added, carrying another cup of coffee to the table. "It was called _Necronomicon_ and it was supposed to be a book of spells, some of which detailed how to open doors to other dimensions."

"You're joking," he said, looking from Sam to me incredulously. "It was published?"

"Limited run, but yeah," I said.

"He had some kind of dinner party and they used one of the spells, and it looks like something might've come through," Sam added, waving a hand toward the living room. "What's not specified is what dimension they opened, but we need a copy of that book."

"Why do I get the feeling that's going to be near impossible?" Dean asked sardonically.

"Probably because it is," Sam said with a shrug. "We can only find one copy still in existence. It's listed on eBay for two hundred thousand dollars."

"Only two? Hang on, lemme get my checkbook." He rubbed a hand along his jaw. "Where's the location?"

"Manhattan," Sam said, his mouth turning down.

"Why's Bobby gone after Dr Visyak again?"

"Dr Visyak has no past history," I said. "She appeared in 1937, age indeterminate and began teaching medieval studies at Columbia in 1939."

"Kind of old for Bobby, ain't she?" Dean frowned, remembering the woman who'd given him the dragon-slaying sword. "She didn't look that old."

"She's probably a lot older than that," Sam told him.

"You think she's what came out of this doorway the writer opened?"

"Pretty sure," Sam said.

"And Bobby's gone after her _alone_?" Dean straightened up suddenly, his chair scraping back on the floor.

"They have a history," I said. "A _close_ history."

"How'd you know that?"

"It's in Bobby's journal," Sam told him. "We checked, after he left without so much as a word of explanation."

"So we're spying on Bobby now?"

"Can you focus?" I asked him. "If we can't get that book, Dr Visyak can probably tell us if she came from Purgatory and maybe how to keep it closed."

"Or she can kill and eat Bobby," Dean said with another glare at me. "And what the hell are you telling Lisa about Crowley for?"

I stood up. "For some strange reason, I thought _you'd_ have filled her in, since you actually lived with her for a year."

In the corner of my eye, I saw Sam's eyebrows shoot up and I walked out of the room. Maybe I was relaxing into this life, I thought, a nervous flutter in my stomach.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

It wasn't far off dawn when I woke suddenly, my mouth dry and my heart still pounding from a dream I couldn't remember. I looked at the moonlit bedroom and decided that two hours sleep wasn't going to be enough to get through the next twenty-four hours and a cup of hot milk might help to get some more. Pulling on my robe and some socks, I headed for the stairs and the kitchen. When I reached the bottom step, I heard voices in the living room and froze.

"Well, it's too bad we got to angel-proof in the first place, isn't it? Why are you here?" Dean said, his voice low but belligerent.

"I want you to understand."

That was Castiel and I wondered how he'd gotten past the wardings.

"Oh, believe me, I get it. Blah, blah, Raphael, right?"

"I'm doing this for you, Dean. I'm doing this because of you," Cas said, his voice filled with an earnestness I didn't think I'd heard before. He sounded as if…well, as if he was pleading with Dean.

"Because of me. Yeah," Dean said sarcastically. "You got to be kidding me."

"You're the one who taught me that freedom and free will –"

"You're a freakin' child, you know that? Just because you can do what you want doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want!"

"I know what I'm doing, Dean," Cas said, the plea gone from his tone suddenly.

"I'm not gonna logic you, okay? I'm saying don't...just 'cause. I'm asking you not to. That's it."

"I don't understand."

"Look, next to Sam, you and Bobby are the closest things I have to family–you are like a brother to me. So, if I'm asking you not to do something...you got to trust me, man," Dean told him, and I leaned against the wall of the staircase, sinking down to sit on the step at the tacit request in his voice. He sounded…I didn't know what exactly he sounded like. As if he were asking for something he didn't think he'd get?

"Or what?" Cas seemed to have missed the monumental occasion of Dean asking for something, taking his plea defensively.

And Dean reacted to that. "Or I'll have to do what I have to do to stop you."

"You can't, Dean," Cas said. "You're just a man. I'm an angel."

For the first time, I heard a pity in the angel's voice. It was deeper than Misha's voice, the timbre rounded. Not an actor forcing that depth, I thought. An angel.

"I don't know. I've taken some pretty big fish," Dean countered, and I wondered if the cockiness was deliberate or involuntary.

The stair under me creaked as I changed my position and the silence from the room told me that both man and angel had heard it. I sighed, getting to my feet and walking down the rest of the stairs to the living room doorway.

Dean looked at me, no doubt wondering how much I'd heard of the conversation. Cas' eyes narrowed as he looked at me, and he took a step closer.

"You didn't quite get one of the sigils correct," he said. "I've come to take you back."

I looked at him for a moment, then looked at Dean, catching a quickly-hidden flash of shock on his face.

"You want to go home?" he asked me brusquely.

"I –"

"She has to go, she doesn't belong here," Cas said, and that was probably the worst thing he could've said at that moment, Dean already pissed at him.

"That's her choice," he said, turning to look at the angel. "Or doesn't free will apply to everyone?"

"She wants to go," Cas said, looking at him.

"Yeah, well, she doesn't," Dean contradicted him without even glancing at me. "She wants to stay here and fight, with us."

The angel turned to look at me and I looked back, unwilling to say anything. I had no idea why Dean had suddenly decided I was needed, if it was just to thwart the angel or if he thought I was going to be useful somewhere down the track, but it made the decision for me, hearing it from him. I was clear enough in what I wanted.

"I want to stay," I told Castiel, trying to suppress the waver in my voice.

Cas looked back at Dean. "I'm sorry, Dean."

"Well, I'm sorry, too, then."

They didn't seem to be talking about anything to do with me. There was a fluttering noise in the room and then it was just us, standing there, looking at the spot where the angel had stood.

"You want to stay?" Dean asked me.

I nodded. "If you don't mind."

He gave me a look I couldn't decipher and looked at the sofa. "What the hell are you doing up anyway?"

"Had a bad dream," I said. "Dean…I'm sorry about Cas."

"I hope you got _some_ idea of how to defeat an angel and the King of Hell," he said tiredly. "'Cos, I'm fresh out."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

* * *

I woke up feeling tired and gluggy and with that heaviness low down in my body that belatedly told me why I'd been feeling so irritable with everything for the last couple of days. And, of course, there wasn't a single tampon in the house.

The tension had been creeping up in the last few days. Bobby had called two days ago from Vermont. His professor/monster lady friend had disappeared from her digs in California and he had a few ideas about how and where to find her, but it was going to take him some time. Sam had located another copy of _Necronomicon_ in the Lovecraft collection in Columbia's library and Dean was antsy to get over there and steal it, while Sam was corresponding with two researchers about getting the information without breaking into the library. And Lisa and Ben were getting cabin-fever, stuck in the house without much to do, just waiting.

All in all, it was not a happy household.

I got up, looked at the spotting in my underwear with annoyance and went to the bathroom to figure out a temporary solution to the problem. Usually, I'd have a couple lying in the bottom of my purse for this kind of situation, but, in the way of fate when it's decided to turn against you, I'd given the bag a clean out the week that the Winchesters had dropped through from their world to mine, and I hadn't gotten around to replacing those essential items.

You might've been wondering what on earth I've been wearing, for the last four weeks, cloistered in a house with three hunters. I should say, right now and out in the open, that I'm not what you'd call a 'girly' girl when it comes to shopping and clothes. In fact, my wardrobe at home only had two dresses, a frothy concoction of mauve frills and such that I'd been convinced to buy for a friend's wedding and which was exiled to the very back of the closet, hidden and buried, out of sight and mostly out of mind; and a very plain, above-the-knee, sleeveless black dress that I wore whenever I had to go to a function that would frown on jeans. I'd very quickly learned that the job required a lot of getting around fast, usually at a run, and clambering through sets and equipment in a manner that was often unladylike and almost certainly revealing to anyone standing below, and had bought the rest of my clothes to suit it. That meant I had jeans. And that was pretty much it.

Having arrived here in a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, denim button-through and a hip-length, kind of ratty-looking black suede coat that had definitely seen better days, while Bobby and Dean and Sam had taken off to deal with Eve's monster mash that first week, I'd bought myself some more jeans, a couple of t-shirts, three soft cotton shirts in solid colours, underwear, socks and a toothbrush. As a result, I looked much the same in this world as I did at home. Probably should've mentioned this earlier, but you know, compared to hybrid monsters and renegade angels, what I'm wearing just doesn't seem that important.

So, in a clean pair of jeans, a white t-shirt and a dark-green shirt buttoned over it, I clomped downstairs, wondering if I could get Dean to lend me his car to get to town. Bobby's isn't that far from Sioux Falls, but it's a couple of miles to the shops and I don't know how you feel at that time of the month, but a four-mile round trip on my feet carrying shopping bags was not something I really wanted to do today.

The kitchen was, as it'd been for the last week, full. Dean and Sam were leaning over Sam's laptop on the small table under the phones and Lisa was at the sink washing the breakfast dishes she and Ben had used while Ben was drying. I'm not a morning person – at least, I'm not a morning person with other people around – I like quiet and I like my first cup of joe to be consumed in complete silence. It's antisocial. Sue me.

There was just enough left in the pot to be considered a cupful and I poured it out and turned, intending to take it elsewhere when Dean looked up.

"Where do you think you're going?"

I stopped and pivoted to look at him balefully. I briefly thought of warning him about the PMT situation then decided against it. Way too much unnecessary sharing. "To the living room. Do I need permission now?"

"We've got a lead on a higher-level demon in Nebraska," Sam said. "Means we'll be gone two-three days."

"Good."

"Not good," Dean told me, looking from me to Lisa. "Means we have to leave you three here without any protection."

"The house is protected," I protested. I'd spent days painting every entrance and vent and window and chimney with the darned symbols, I knew it was protected. "I changed the angel sigil as soon as Cas left."

"Not enough," Dean said, shaking his head. "Lisa knows how to shoot. You don't."

"Point and pull the trigger, right?" I said, half-turning to keep going to the living room and get some of the peace I was longing for. How much harder could it be than the shotgun, anyway?

He grinned humourlessly. "Lessons in five minutes."

"What? I'm not even awake yet," I told him, wondering I was going to get to town before the situation got worse. "And you can't leave us here without a car."

"There's a van in the workshop," Dean said, his smile turning callous. "It runs."

"Sort of," Sam threw in, with a kind of comme-ci-comme-ça hand-wave.

"Sort of," Dean agreed, his face becoming expressionless. He turned to look at Lisa and Ben. "Refresher course for you as well."

Lisa nodded, wiping her hands dry on the dishtowel and hanging it up. "Sounds like fun."

I turned away and clomped to the living room. I would need every drop of the caffeine in the cup to get through this.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby had a target range at the back of the yard, about thirty yards long, sandbags stuffed into several wrecks to aim for, fields and marsh behind those. The Beretta wasn't all that heavy to begin with but it gained weight the longer I held it and the man-outline paper target looked a long way away, though Sam had set it up at what he said was only ten yards from us.

"Not like that, it hasn't got much of a kick, but you'll fire high if you hold it like that," Dean told me irritably, looking at the way I was standing and making a downward chopping movement with his hand.

I was going to point out that my sole gun-training experience had come from watching tv, but I gave it up before I started. He was crabby, I was grumpy, nothing good was going to come of arguing about it.

"Lise, you try first, whole clip," he said, turning away from me to look at her.

She lifted the gun in her hand and starting firing. I couldn't see if she was hitting the target or not but after ten very loud shots, she lowered the gun and ejected the magazine, and Dean nodded, seeming to be satisfied. Sam took the paper target off the frame and put a fresh one on, bringing Lisa's back with him.

"Not bad," he said to her, smiling. Closer up, I could see that she'd hit the outline with every shot, the ragged holes grouped quite close together in the chest region.

This is probably going to sound really lame, but I couldn't help but feel disheartened by the sight. Maybe it was a side-effect of my current state of mind, maybe I was being too sensitive, but I just knew I was going to miss the whole darned target and get yelled at.

"Okay, put your hand under the butt," Dean said, looking at me. "Don't aim too high, and sight along the barrel."

In the open air, the shots weren't that loud, but my eyes still closed involuntarily as I pulled the trigger.

"Gonna have more luck if you keep your eyes open, Dorothy," Dean grunted from beside me.

He moved around behind me, and his arms came around each side of mine, his breath warm suddenly on my cheek, and a very distracting flush of heat rising through me as I felt him press close from shoulder to thigh.

"Recoil comes through the wrists," he said, his hands closing over both of mine where they wrapped around the gun. "Keep your elbows soft. And squeeze, don't pull."

His finger slid through the guard over the top of mine, and the gun fired, a black hole appearing in the chest of the target.

I would've been ecstatic to get that shot if it hadn't been for the overwhelming rush of sensations my brain was trying to sort out and decipher.

"Try again."

No one should have a voice like that, I thought, squinting down the short barrel to the notch at its end and squeezing the trigger slowly. A second black hole appeared next to the first, but I'd flinched back against him and he shook his head.

"Stand still and concentrate," I was admonished.

"Maybe she needs some breathing room," Lisa said sharply.

Dean let go of the gun and stepped back. I didn't look around at either of them, pulling in a deep breath instead and trying to simultaneously stiffen my wrists, relax my elbows, keep my eyes wide open and squeeze the trigger. The retort was loud but this time I didn't flinch and didn't close my eyes and I was overjoyed to see the third hole barely an inch from the other two.

I looked around to see that no one else had even noticed. Dean was talking to Lisa in a tone deliberately pitched to be inaudible, Sam was fiddling with the target sheets and Ben had wandered off somewhere else.

"Don't stop, empty the clip!" Dean turned his head to snap at me in the middle of his conversation, turning back to Lisa before the last word was out.

I looked back at the target and managed to get the next three shots into the chest area. Deciding to experiment a bit, I tried for a headshot with the next bullet, clipping the target's ear which I thought might have hurt a bit but probably couldn't be considered fatal. The next one went into the target's mouth – or where the mouth might be if it'd been drawn in – and the thought of that just grossed me out totally.

"Stick to the body," Sam said quietly from just behind me. "Usually it's the part that's moving the least. It's only in the movies that anyone can shoot someone's hand, or shoot a gun out of it. Doesn't take that much effort to move it."

I nodded and put the last three bullets into the chest. They weren't as closely grouped as the earlier shots, probably because my wrists were aching, my head was pounding from both the noise and the tension of handling what was undoubtedly a very lethal weapon and my shoulders were somewhere up around my ears, but they were all within the outlines and I think they would've been fatal. At least, to a person, I realised. Maybe not to a demon or angel or monster.

"Will these even have an effect on demons and angels?" I asked him when the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and I tried to remember how to eject the magazine. Another thing everyone on tv made look easy, yet was surprisingly and annoyingly difficult.

"Here," he said, leaning past me and showing me the small, black button just above the grip. "Probably not much, it'll slow 'em down."

I managed to catch the magazine as it slipped out and juggled the gun, magazine and the replacement magazine Sam handed me for a long tension-filled moment, almost dropping all three. There was a click as the new one slid in.

"Come on, I'll show you how to refill that," Sam said, turning back to the house.

That seemed to be all that was required of me, so I followed him inside and down to the basement, and he pulled out a box of ammunition, demonstrating how to push each bullet into the metal sleeve.

"Did you read –" I started to say.

"You seem to be –" Sam said at the same time.

"Sorry, you go," I said quickly and he shook his head.

"Not important."

"I was just going to ask if you read the last half of the script?" I asked him, wondering what he'd about to say that suddenly wasn't important. _You seem to be_…what?

He nodded. "How did Crowley know about Lisa and Ben?"

"I think from when he went to Cas, the first time." I tried to remember back to the first episode of the season. "He saw him at Lisa's place, in Cicero. In the episode we saw from Bobby's point of view, Crowley kind of congratulated himself as being a part of your efforts to save the world from Lucifer, maybe he kept an eye on what Dean was doing?"

"Yeah, maybe," Sam said. He looked down at the gun in my hand. "Not much of a lesson, sorry. Keep the safety on when you're carrying it, but don't forget about taking it off once it's in your hand."

I nodded, pushing the small lever until I could see the red dot and gingerly sliding the gun into the back of my jeans. It was cold, heavy and uncomfortable, pressed against the small of my back, but I'd just have to live with it.

"If you find Crowley's location from this demon, are you going straight there?" I asked him as we climbed the stairs back to the kitchen.

"I don't know," Sam admitted, glancing down the hall. "Dean's fed up with being cooped up here, but he's worried about leaving."

Crowley knew this place, but he didn't know that it now held Lisa and Ben. Or did he?

"Does Cas know Lisa and Ben are here?" I asked him.

"Don't know," Sam said. "And Cas is one of the main reasons Dean's worried."

He headed out the back door and I turned down the hallway for the stairs.

"– really don't need to watch you cozying up to some girl, Dean," Lisa's voice came from the living room, rising in annoyance.

"Oh, I see, but it's okay for you to see some doctor –"

I veered wildly back around to the kitchen and followed Sam out through the back door, not wanting to hear that conversation. I have to tell you, I really didn't like Lisa over the odd episodes I'd seen her in through the years of the show. She'd seemed kind of judgemental in the first one, and it was a bit hard to imagine how she'd carried a torch for Dean for so long when she didn't appear to know much about him at all. The last week in close quarters with her hadn't done much to change my opinion. She seemed to be an okay person and she clearly doted on her son, but there wasn't a lot else there, if you know what I mean.

"Hey," Sam said, looking around as I came into the shed.

"Hey, is that the van that sort of runs?" I asked him, pointing to a six-seater parked to one side.

"Yeah, you need to go somewhere?"

"Uh, yeah, I thought it might be a good idea to stock up and stay put while you're gone," I told him.

"Do you want a hand with that?" He put down the tools he was holding and looked at me.

"Um…sure."

I could ditch him in the market, I was pretty sure.

The front door slammed at that moment, and we both turned to hear Dean's impatient yell.

"Sam! C'mon, we're going!"

"Sorry," Sam said, wiping his hands on an oily rag. "Keys are in it, should be gassed up, make sure you're quick."

"I will," I promised, watching him walk out to the Impala.

Dean barely waited for him to get in before he was moving, the tyres crunching over the gravel as he accelerated for the yard's gate.

I thought it might be a good idea to give Lisa a chance to cool off as well, and walked around the van. The keys were hanging from the ignition and the fuel gauge read half-full.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

By the time I got back to the house, I was uncomfortable, hot, tired and basically every guy's PMT nightmare. I figured it was lucky there were no guys around.

Unpacking in the kitchen, I could hear the tv going in the living room. Bobby had reluctantly bought a new one to replace his ancient floor-cabinet set and I guessed Ben was watching.

"Hey, need a hand with that?"

I jumped, not having heard Lisa come in, dropping the tins of tomatoes in my hands and flinching again at the noise of them hitting the floor. "Wow, uh, yes, thanks."

"How long have you known Dean and Sam?" she asked, bending to pick up the tins from the floor.

"Not long," I told her, turning back to the bag of groceries and pulling out cheese, milk and sliced ham for the fridge. I'm not entirely sure why I wasn't being all that forthcoming, some instinct maybe, or just the difficulties of knowing what to say, how much to say. It wasn't just my story, and the Winchesters were just as paranoid in real life as they were on the show.

"How long is 'not long'?" she asked, smiling to take some of the edge from the question.

It confirmed the feeling that she wasn't asking out of a desire to get to know me. I shrugged and went back to the bags for more stuff.

"About four weeks," I said, pulling out steak and ground beef and pasta. "They stopped by to see Bobby."

"And stayed," she said.

"Bobby had some stuff he needed their help with."

"This is – you know about what they do, I mean, all of it?" she asked, and I got the feeling her curiosity was overriding her main reason for talking for the moment. "The hunting, the monsters?"

"A bit about it," I hedged, walking around her to the laundry, my arms full of laundry detergent and fabric softener and soap. I'd pretty much bought whatever I could think so that it didn't look like the trip was just for a pack of tampons.

"How's that?"

"Sorry, what?" I called out from the laundry, looking at the cupboards that were already loaded with the things I was carrying. Should've checked them first. Putting them on the floor, I pushed things around a bit and made some more room.

"How is it that you know about hunting and monsters?" Lisa repeated, her voice clear now that she was standing in the doorway watching me.

_Keep it simple_, I told myself. _Simple and unverifiable_.

"I've helped Bobby out from time to time," I said, red-faced as I finished shoving the unneeded items into the cupboard and got to my feet. "Just information, I…um…used to be a research assistant, at a college out west."

"So you're not a hunter?"

"God, no," I said, laughing nervously as I eased past her and back to the counter. "Are you kidding? No."

"Is there something between you and Dean?"

That question came out of the blue and I gripped the pack of marshmallows I was holding so tightly I could see my finger marks in the soft confections.

"No," I said, glad to hear my voice quiet and steady. "I barely know him."

She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes dark and slightly narrowed as she considered the answer.

"Sorry for the third degree," she said eventually, shrugging. "Did he tell you about us?"

"Uh, no."

"We lived together, for a while," she said, walking closer to take the bag of oranges from me. "I thought it would be a lot longer, but his life…his life is impossible."

It would've been a good time to change the subject, to suffer a brain haemorrhage, to have a hole open up under my feet and suck me down into the earth. Unfortunately, none of those things happened and I opened my mouth, as driven by curiosity about her as she seemed to be about me.

"Didn't you know what he did, before, I mean?"

"Yeah, but when he turned up again, he said that part of his life was over, and I believed him. Sam had – had gone, and he said he was quitting and then…"

"Sam came back," I said, forgetting momentarily that I wasn't supposed to know anything about that.

"Yeah," she said, looking at me quizzically. "Good guess."

"He must still care, he went and got you and Ben when he thought you were in danger," I said, more carefully.

"He cares," Lisa agreed sadly. "Just not – not enough."

"Or too much?"

She turned back to me and smiled. I wasn't sure if it was at the thought or out of politeness. "He was good with Ben. We both miss that. Miss him. But what he does, I can't risk Ben in the life he has."

I refrained, somewhat miraculously I thought later, from asking why then was she worried about Dean being interested in anyone else, and finished unpacking the groceries. _Just cause you love someone, doesn't mean you should stick around and screw up their life_, I thought. What _had_ they talked about before he'd gone to see Ben in his room?

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

In a tv show, when two women and a young boy get left alone while the heroes take off for parts unknown to torture demons, something always happens. It's like a rule. A tv rule. But, nothing did here.

Bobby called to say he'd talked to Eleanor and she'd disappeared on him. He'd be back the next day. Sam called to check in a bit later and said they'd found the demon and had him trussed up. I did a load of overdue washing and spent about an hour pegging it all out on the line behind the house, taking it in a few hours later and ironing the linen and the men's shirts out of sheer boredom. Lisa made fried chicken for dinner. We ate. The conversation remained impersonal and non-threatening. She and Ben went to bed. I read for another few hours and then did the same. The next day followed more or less along the same lines, and on the third, Bobby drove in at sundown.

I was in the living room, watching the fax machine when he came in, pushing his hat back slightly as he looked around at the piles of books, notes and folders that I'd been going through.

"Anything good?"

"The researchers Sam's been courting came through," I told him, passing him the pages from _Necronomicon_ that had already been printed. "The ritual needs an eclipse."

"That gives us time," Bobby said, dropping into the armchair and starting to read.

"I thought I'd make spaghetti," Lisa said from the doorway, Ben hovering behind her. "Is that okay with everyone?"

Bobby glanced up and over to me. I nodded distractedly at him, counting the rest of the pages. I'd forgotten about dinner entirely when the machine had beeped and started printing.

"That'd be great, Lisa," Bobby said, his gaze dropping back to the pages.

Neither of us were particularly good in the making-folks-feel-at-home arena. She left and Ben gave the tv a wistful look before turning around and following his mother back to the kitchen. In retrospect, a bit more attention to them might've made a difference. It might not have. It can't have been all that easy, staying in a virtual stranger's house with nothing to do. And the worry about the school time Ben was missing out on probably didn't help either.

Bobby was listing the ingredients and I was still reading through the pages when we heard the Impala's deep rumble outside the house. Neither of us looked up.

Dean and Sam came in a moment later, Sam veering into the living when he saw Bobby, Dean following him in.

"What you find?"

"The ritual for the opening of doorway to Purgatory," I said, getting up and handing him a sheaf of papers. Sam looked at Bobby.

"What about you, you find Dr Visyak?"

"Yeah, I found her. Damned stubborn woman thinks she's better off protecting herself," Bobby growled without lifting his gaze from the paper.

"Well, if we can get this shut down before they open the door –" Dean started to say and Bobby shook his head, glancing up at me.

"We're all on the same timetable," I told him. "Next eclipse."

"So we can't get in first?" Dean asked disgruntedly.

"No, if you want to disrupt the ritual –"

"Sorry to interrupt, but dinner's ready, if anyone's interested," Lisa said from the doorway. Dean and Sam looked up at her, Bobby didn't move, and I was trying to find the ritual in the pages to show the brothers.

"Uh, you and Ben start without us," Dean said, waving his hand with the pages in it. "We just need to catch up…" he paused as she about-faced and disappeared. "…on this stuff."

"Better go deal with that," Sam said, looking at Dean. He shrugged and took the page from me when I found it.

Five minutes later there was a crash of breaking china and the echo-ey bonging of metal pans on the floor and Dean shot out through the door. Bobby sighed, Sam put down his pages and I gathered up all the fax pages, following them to the dining room and stopping behind them.

"It's been two weeks, we can't just stay here indefinitely!" Lisa was shouting at Dean, spaghetti sauce and pasta spread over most of the old linoleum between them. "We have lives! Ben has school! I can't live like this! This is exactly what we talked about before!"

"I'm trying to keep you alive," he said to her, stepping gingerly away from the mess. "That's the only reason I brought you here –"

Sam made a slight move to go to him and Bobby and I grabbed him, yanking him back and out of the room as Lisa more-or-less exploded at the ill-thought phrasing of Dean's defence. There are times to intervene and times when it's just best to let people slug it out. This seemed like one of the latter occasions and I knew Bobby felt the same way.

"Give 'em some time," Bobby told Sam as he sat back down in the chair and picked up his notebook. "They'll sort it out."

"But –"

"Seriously, Sam," I told him firmly. "The last thing they need is an audience, and that's all you'd be."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Bobby and Sam were still going over the ritual and ingredients when I ventured back into the dining room. We'd heard the front door slam open and shut, heard footsteps going up the stairs and then there'd been silence for the last fifteen minutes.

Looking at the sauce and spaghetti congealing the remnants of the broken china to the floor, I sighed and went to the cupboard for the dustpan, a mop and a bucket, filling a bucket as I scraped the mess off the lino and dumped it into the trash can.

"I would've done that," Dean said from behind me and I jumped, nearly knocking the bucket over.

"Not a problem," I said, grabbing the edge and holding onto it as I got to my feet. Don't ask me why I was so jumpy, I couldn't tell you. It could've been the tension in the house. Could've been a number of things. I didn't feel like self-analysis.

He stood there, looking at the mop as I cleaned off the last bits of sauce from around the table, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

"Bobby and Sam have figured out the list of things Crowley's going to need," I told him, uncomfortable with him standing there, saying nothing. "You should probably take a look."

He lifted his head and nodded, half-turning to go, then stopping. "You think she'll be okay?"

I didn't think she'd be okay. I thought she was quite a long way from being okay but I had the feeling he knew that.

"She feels left out, I think," I said, somewhat inadequately.

His face twisted as he looked away. "She didn't want to know about this stuff."

"Or you didn't want to tell her."

He looked back me, frowning. "I tried to, last year. I stopped because she asked me –"

He suddenly seemed to realise that he was talking to me about his relationship and the closed-off look came back.

"When you were turned, she said she wanted to know what was going on with you," I persisted, god knows why.

He barked a short laugh. "Yeah, right. Tell her everything when I'm a vampire and I'm figuring that Sam's gonna kill me when I get back."

"You didn't, even afterward," I reminded him.

"Afterward…" he hesitated, and the closed-off look vanished, the memories fluttering across his face. "I was a monster. And that could've happened again, anytime. I –"

He swung away and walked out without finishing that sentence, although I could guess at what he'd about to say. He'd said it to Ben. _Not fit to sit at their table_.

I shoved the mop into the bucket and took both to the laundry, tipping out the dirty water and rinsing both and putting them away.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Lisa must've coasted out of the yard very early the next morning because none of us heard the sound of the van leaving or had the slightest clue she was gone until Dean went upstairs to talk to her. Dean spent two hours driving around in the direction of Michigan, thinking she might have tried to head home, Sam riding shotgun and Bobby and I calling Bobby's contacts in the towns that were more-or-less along the route.

They got back at midday, and by then the reports were all over the news. Bobby gestured to the television as Dean walked in.

"_The van seems to have crossed all six lanes before crashing through the guard-rail and over the drop. Police have not yet said if there were any survivors and –"_

Dean's phone rang and he startled at the noise, pulling it from his pocket impatiently. He hit Call and the colour drained from his face.

"Crowley, let 'em go now, or I swear..." His face hardened into stone as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. "I am going to kill you."

Bobby and Sam looked up as Dean's knuckles whitened over the cell he held. "I'm telling you, last chance to let 'em go easy."

His eyes closed and for a moment he just stood there, frozen. Then he stabbed the end-call button and shoved the cell back in his pocket.

"What's the story?" Bobby asked.

"He got 'em on the interstate," Dean said tightly, waving a hand at the tv. "Same as the script, the rest of it," he added, looking at me accusingly. "If we can't stop this crap from happening, what's the point?"

"We've got the location of his place," Sam said quickly, looking from Bobby to his brother.

"And Crowley's put a demon into Lisa," I said. "In the draft, you don't know about it –"

"I know! I read the fucking script! What am I supposed to do about it?!" he demanded. "I can't use the knife and I can't exorcise it without it hurting her!"

"You could 'cuff her," I said. The idea had occurred to me two weeks ago, before I'd realised it would ever get this far and I'd shelved it, thinking I'd ask how hard it was to engrave handcuffs sometime when the brothers had some free time – which had never happened. "Bobby, you said a devil's trap has no field of influence, the demon has to be right inside or it can escape."

"Yeah, so?"

"But the other trap, the one in the book of Solomon, didn't that have a field that could hold a demon even if it was partly enclosed?" I asked. I'd spent time studying the book for any clues about Purgatory, mostly coming up with nothing but there'd been a design I'd asked Bobby about.

Sam nodded suddenly. "I remember that as well," he said, glancing apologetically at Dean. "We didn't have the time to go right through it before the crash but I remembered reading about it, thinking we could use it for a hex bag, sometime."

"Alright," Dean said through his teeth. He looked at Bobby. "You got a copy of the book?"

The one Bobby had given them originally had been destroyed in the crash.

"'Course, think I could live without that?" he snapped back at Dean, getting up and going to the shelves. "How would you use it?"

"I thought, maybe you could engrave it on a pair of handcuffs…" I suggested tentatively. "If the meatsuit was restrained as well as the demon, you could exorcise the demon safely? For Lisa, I mean?"

"Bobby, you got –?"

"In the basement, third bench from the stairs," Bobby answered, flicking through the pages of the book. "Here, take this."

Sam grabbed the book and bounded out of the room and Dean looked at me speculatively.

"Anything else?"

"Can you make sure that Ben can't be possessed? Is there a charm or something he could wear? Or could the tattoo be painted on somehow?"

"He doesn't get possessed in the script," Dean said warily.

"In the script, Balthazar tells you the location and Lisa gets stabbed – we're off the script now and I'm just trying to think of all the possibilities."

"Ellen and Jo had charms," Bobby said, walking out of the room. "Think they got 'em from Rufus, I'll check his stuff, see if there're any more."

"Did you think she'd take off?" Dean asked when he'd gone.

"No," I said. Actually I hadn't even thought about it. A Winchester tells you that the King of Hell is after you and I wouldn't have taken off, no matter how much aggravation there was. I saw a familiar expression on his face.

_Guilt._

"This wasn't your fault."

He looked at me and smiled, his mouth lifting but his eyes still dark and cold. "Only one in the room."

Shaking off the feelings he seemed to be drowning in, he looked around. "Sam and me'll get Lisa and Ben back. You and Bobby need to get that stuff to screw up Cas and Crowley's ritual. We gotta be ready to roll as soon as we're done there."

I nodded and watched him walk out the door.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

We were ready when they got back. They weren't.

The cuffs had worked fine, Sam had told me. Dean'd got the demon out and put the charms on both of them and Sam had been covering the alleyway from the door to the car and hadn't seen the guy on the roof. The bullet had been a stray, ricocheting from an iron door across the alley as Sam'd taken out the sniper and it'd hit Ben in the side, going through his ribs and lungs and lodging just under his heart.

Ben had been dying in the hospital room and Lisa had spilled her fear and anger and pain over them, Sam had said, Dean just sitting there, taking it. When Cas had appeared, he'd thought his brother was going to try to kill the angel. But he'd subsided when Cas had touched the boy and healed him completely.

"It was probably the only reason Dean came back at all," Sam had said to me in the kitchen. "But at the same time, it broke something in him, something in Lisa too. He asked Cas to wipe out their memories of him."

I frowned at him. "That won't reduce their vulnerability as leverage for him, it makes it worse, they won't know –"

"Preaching to the choir, Terry," Sam said gently. "I don't think he did it because of that." He got up from the table and yawned. "We're ready for tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah, today," I said, looking at my watch.

"I'm going to get some sleep," he said, with another jaw-cracking yawn. "See you in the morning."

"Night, Sam."

I stayed at the table for a few more minutes then got to my feet. I had a bad feeling that Eleanor Visyak had not made it past Castiel. Her blood was one of the ingredients for opening the doorway. I wondered if there was anything that would counteract a transdimensional monster's blood as I wandered around turning off the lights on the way to the living room.

Dean was lying on the couch, an almost-empty bottle on the floor beside him. I couldn't see if his eyes were open or shut and I tip-toed past him, hoping to be able to gather up the fax pages without waking him if he was out.

"I'm up," he said, the words slurring slightly. "Don't have to be quiet."

"Sorry, I'll just get this stuff and leave you –"

"Alone? You too?" he muttered, sitting up and swaying a little as he reached out to grab my wrist. "Don't."

I looked down at the hand curled around my arm. "You okay, Dean?"

"Nope," he said, letting me go and tipping back to lean against the high back of the sofa. "Not okay."

On the show, I'd never seen him try to talk to anyone but Sam. But the writers had kept on killing off all the characters – _people_, here – he might've tried to talk to so it was hard to say if that was a result of choice or a lack of opportunity. Either way, I thought it would best to keep quiet and if he wanted to talk, he would. If not, then it looked like he'd pass out fairly soon.

"Sam told you, huh?"

"Yes, he told me." I licked my lips a bit nervously. "It was just bad luck, the bullet, Dean. It wasn't on you."

"Tell you 'bout Cas?" he asked, peering at me with unfocussed eyes, either ignoring or not registering what I'd said. "Tell you Cas saved Ben?"

I nodded.

"I really did want him to be mine, you know?" he said after a moment. "I don't know why, I didn't think I'd get to thirty, but there was something…I don't know."

"You always wanted family, Dean," I ventured. His family, for a long time. His father. His mother. Sam. All together. But I thought that somewhere, under that wish, he'd wanted a family that belonged solely to him, as well.

"Yeah, I did," he said. He rubbed a hand over his eyes tiredly. "Mine kept dying."

"Why didn't you stay with Lisa and Ben, when Sam came back?"

He looked down, his face shadowed and hollowed out a bit. I didn't think he was going to answer, the silence getting longer and longer. Then he did.

"When I was there, it wasn't me," he mumbled, leaning forward as he looked around for the bottle. "Lise…Lise asked me about my life, and I told her, what I could, a bit anyway. I got the feeling she didn't want to know all of it. And I couldn't tell her…all of it."

He spotted the gleam of the light on the neck of the bottle and reached out for it, tipping to one side and catching himself just before he fell. His fingers closed around the neck and he swallowed the last couple of mouthfuls down.

"I couldn't let her in," he said, letting go of the bottle, blinking as it hit the floor with a dull thud. "And I couldn't _be_ me. And I couldn't love her, but I knew she loved me. She thought she did. She wanted to," he said, the words falling out in a heap. "That year, it was already starting to…change…me. Didn't want it. Didn't want that."

He looked up, his expression almost startled that I was there, sitting there, listening to him. Then his eyes rolled up and his eyelids dropped and he tipped over onto his side, his alcohol tolerance finally reached, I guessed. I grabbed his feet and wrestled them onto the sofa so he was lying straight at least, then reached out for the blanket that lay across the back of the sofa, pulling it over the top of him.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_**AN:**__ Sorry this chapter was a bit of a long one. More action in the next! Apologies too for any errors. I was rushing this a bit.  
_


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

* * *

_**AN:**__ Sorry about the long delay on this chapter. Real life intruded with a bang and I've spent much of the week dealing with things I'd much rather not have been dealing with! I hope you find the chapter worth the wait!_

* * *

I didn't get any sleep at all that night.

On the show, the year Dean spent with Lisa and Ben was shown as a montage, under the credits. I thought it was a production thing, or maybe just a reaction to the fans, who didn't really want to see the domestic side of Dean Winchester, but I'd been disappointed that they didn't make an effort to film a couple of scenes at least, if only for flashback purposes later on, showing some more truthful moments of the couple's relationship.

It hadn't occurred to me until now that even in the montage, Dean – or rather, Jensen, back home – hadn't really smiled. Not once. I wondered if the writers who could see what was happening decided that filming Dean mostly depressed would be a bad idea.

The way he looked, when he'd been talking, kept rising against the blackness of my eyelids when I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd seen Dean devastated and broken and helplessly vulnerable in the show…when he'd realised his father had sacrificed his soul for him…when Sam had been killed…when Sam had chosen Ruby over him…notice the pattern here? Always in the show, that vulnerability came out because of his brother, or his father, not because of anything that happened to him or that he wanted for himself.

Rolling over, I noticed that there was light leeching in around the edges of the curtains and morning was going to beat me to the finish line before I could get any hope of sleep. I got up and pushed the curtains aside, leaning the side of my face against the cool glass of the window panes and looking over the junkyard to the flat fields behind Bobby's. They were now mostly covered in a grey mist, looking as impermanent and as unlikely as a set with a dry-ice fog machine.

Had the writers _always_ seen more than they'd shown? Given what had happened in the last few weeks, it seemed obvious to me that they had, had edited and filtered what they saw to make it more entertaining television, to keep it more to what the fans said they wanted.

What else had they changed?

Had Dean really gone to Cicero when he'd been about to hand himself over to Michael? Had Sam really let the vampire attack Dean, when he'd been without a soul? How the heck could I be sure of any of the so-called facts I thought I'd known about them now?

A glance at the clock showed it was just shy of five in the morning. Heaving a very dramatic and quite self-pitying sigh at the hopeless improbability of getting any answers to my questions, I turned away from the window and got dressed, gathering up the folder and carrying it with me downstairs. I wasn't even sure why, you know, the things I'd been sure about before in my little 'bible', I was doubting more and more.

Dean was still asleep on the sofa, the blanket dragged over one shoulder, and I walked past the living room quietly, heading for the kitchen and nearly having a heart attack when I realised that someone was sitting hunched up at the small table in the dim room.

Sam lifted his head and I tried not to pat my chest like some ridiculous starlet in a bad drama production as I recognised the shaggy outline of his hair.

"You okay?" The words were out before I even realised I was going to ask, the expression on his face impossible to make out in the gloom, but he seemed to be emitting waves of some feeling that didn't look so good to me, even only half-seen.

He sat taller in the chair and nodded, running a hand through his hair. The so-familiar gesture was almost reassuring.

"You're up early," he said, clearing his throat a little bit. "Couldn't sleep?"

"D-day for Purgatory, who could?" I returned, a lot more flippantly than I felt.

"Right."

I dropped the folder on the table and went over to the coffee pot, checking that the reservoir was full and the filter and coffee grounds were new and turning it on. It was silent for a moment then began to burble to itself quietly.

"What about you?" I asked him as I walked over to the lightswitch and turned on the light.

"Uh, yeah, just couldn't sleep," he said evasively. He bowed his head as if he was hiding from the light.

"Sam?"

When he looked up reluctantly, I could see in his face that he knew what he looked like, his normally-tanned skin pale, and reddish-purple shadows under his eyes.

"Just dreams," he told me, with a light shrug.

I suppose I could've let it go then, I mean, everyone has bad dreams, right? But this was Sam Winchester, and I had the feeling that his dreams were about a hundred and forty billion light-years away from other people's bad dreams.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"Uh, no, not really," he said, pushing the chair back and getting up. He walked over to the cupboard and pulled out a couple of cups, taking his time and keeping his back to me.

"It's not about…?"

For a second he just kind of stilled, like a robot that's had the power plug pulled. Then he huffed out a sharp exhale and shook his head.

"No, just the usual monster and angel crap."

I knew it was a lie the second the words came out of his mouth. Don't ask me how, or why. I just knew it in the same way I knew he wasn't going to admit to it.

_Now, Sam, I'm gonna put up a barrier inside your mind._ The dry and measured voice of Julian Richings came out of my memories of watching the earlier aired episodes and I looked down at the table top, remembering the scene clearly.

_It might feel a little…itchy. Do me a favour, don't scratch the wall. Trust me. You're not going to like what happens._

Sam's wall, holding back the memories of Hell. Holding back the memories of Lucifer and the Cage, and of Michael in his half-brother.

"Sam, are you remembering anything?" I didn't want to ask him that, it was so terribly personal, but I couldn't sit there and pretend that everything was alright either.

"No," he said, much too quickly, his shoulders seeming to tighten further as he poured the coffee from the pot into the cups. "No, I don't remember anything."

I was going to press him harder. I opened my mouth only to hear another voice.

"Good, yer up," Bobby said as he came into the dining room and I saw Sam turn around, his coffee slopping over the cup rim and onto his hand, the skin reddening under it, but his expression relieved as he looked at Bobby.

"Where's your brother?"

"Sleeping it off in the living room," Sam said, putting my cup down in front of me and wiping the cup he held to hand it to Bobby. He turned away to get another from the cupboard. "Empty bottle beside him."

I didn't say anything about that, and Bobby sat down at the table, pulling out a sheet of parchment from his pocket. He glanced at me.

"Not in one of those moods where you're spilling everything today, are ya?"

I moved my cup to the other end of the table, just in case, and shook my head.

"Good," he said, smoothing the paper flat. "This is the ritual we gotta use to keep that damned door shut."

"Does it override whatever Cas and Crowley have for opening it?" Sam asked, bringing his cup to the table and sitting down on the opposite side.

"It undoes what they do, so if we're quick enough, we should be able to slam it shut before they get the souls out, no harm, no foul."

"If we're quick enough?" Sam asked, his eyebrows rising in doubt.

"Well, no one said it was goin' to be easy," Bobby growled. "Ellie gave me the ritual and she headed off to somewhere she said was going to be safe. They need the blood of a native of Purgatory to open the door, so if she can stay hidden and they don't find any other monster that might've slipped out, they won't be able to open it. She's gonna ring me in three hours to confirm that she got out okay."

"The lunar eclipse is tomorrow night," I added. "Cas was able to find you because when he pulled you out and healed Dean at Stull's, the wardings were erased from your ribs. You're all going to need not only the Enochian warding to hide from him on the way there, but also a way to prevent Crowley from seeing you."

"I found that," Sam said, blinking at me and looking to Bobby. "Sorry, I was going to tell you yesterday. In that book you got from Dad's lockup, there's a sigil there that is supposed to protect anyone from any hellspawn's x-ray vision."

Bobby frowned absently at him, obviously trying to remember which book or books he'd gotten from John Winchester's storage unit. "The demonology?" he asked after a moment's intense thought. "I thought that was just histories?"

"No, there's a section at the back with a whole bunch of crap about Hell," Sam said, picking up his cup and sipping the coffee.

Instantly, I _knew_ he was lying again. He might have found a way to stop Crowley from seeing them, I thought, but it hadn't come from a book.

"Well, good," Bobby said, scratching his forehead under the peak of his cap. "We better get started." He threw a look over his shoulder at the door. "How long do you want to let him sleep?"

"A couple more hours," Sam said, draining his cup and getting up. "I'll get the bag packed. Oh," he added, turning back to the old man. "There's a thing about the demon sigil."

"Yeah?" Bobby looked up at him, his voice suddenly wary.

"Yeah, we have to cut them in," Sam told him, turning away and going to the sink.

"Perfect," Bobby muttered and looked at me. "If we have to do this, you know you're probably gonna have the steadiest hand."

"What!?" I squeaked at him.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Four hours later I was sitting at the window of the dining room, Sam's bare back in front of me, holding a scalpel in my left hand and a drawing of the sigil in my right.

"I really don't think I can _do_ this, Bobby," I said, looking at the way the fine-edged blade was shaking in my grip.

"You couldn't be worse than the Butcher of Sioux Falls," Dean said sourly from the dining room table, wiping ineffectually at the blood trickles on his chest and smearing them into a red mess.

"Bite me," Bobby growled at him from the corner of his mouth, dabbing at his own bare, bloody chest with a wet washcloth.

Ellie had called, a half-hour late and had only given Bobby an address before hanging up. Bobby had cut the Enochian sigil into Dean's back, and the demon ward on his chest, Dean complaining loudly the entire time. Dean's hands had been shaking worse than mine was when he'd returned the favour on Bobby and neither were happy with each other, Bobby pointedly handing me the scalpel when Sam had pulled off his shirt to get his done.

"You'll be fine, just concentrate on not going too deep," Sam said to me over his shoulder, ignoring his brother and Bobby, his voice sounding almost encouraging.

_This was what this life was like_, I told myself, inhaling noisily as I leaned forward and lifted the drawing. _There's been blood all over the show and it never bothered you before_, I added mentally, looking at the smooth tan skin in front of me. Of course it'd been _fake_ blood and the actors had wiped it off after the take and…

_Just DO IT!_

My stomach rolled over slowly as I made the first cut, as shallowly as I could, following the curving line of the first half of the circle. It was a very fine line, but Sam's blood welled up in it and began to seep out past the edges before I'd even finished. I could hear my teeth grinding together, the noise loud in the junction between my jaw and ear, but I couldn't stop it, an old childhood habit that reoccurred with monumental stress.

"What's that noise?" Dean asked, looking around the room.

The demon sigil was relatively easy, a circle, a five-pointed star in the centre, four more-or-less wiggly lines in the gaps in between the two that Bobby had said were the names of the archangels in Hebrew. When Sam turned around for the Enochian character, I gave a delicate shudder because that one was a whole bunch of lines with small circles intersecting them. The scalpel blade was fine and the tip was pointed but I couldn't get the memory out of my head of my cousin digging around in the sole of my foot with a knife blade, trying to extract a splinter I'd gotten from the old wharf one summer vacation by the sea. _Digging around_ was the bit I'd remembered the clearest. It'd been excruciatingly painful and he hadn't even gotten the darned piece of wood out, just left a bloody hole in my foot.

"It's okay," Sam said, smiling slightly although his back must have been stinging and aching like crazy. "This is nothing compared to being branded and having the brand burned off," he added, with a fast look at Bobby.

That made my stomach practically leap into my throat and I swallowed and stared at the only flattish section of skin in front of me, lifting the blade and hesitating.

"Shouldn't I, um, sterilise the blade or something, between these?" I asked, hoping it didn't sound like I just trying to put off that first slice.

"It's the same blood as he's got in his back," Bobby told me tersely. "No one died of tetanus here yet."

"Not for lack of trying," Dean muttered as he eased his t-shirt back over his head.

"You done whining or is this gonna go on for awhile?"

"It's fine," Sam interrupted, dragging my attention back to him. "Just do it, putting it off only makes it harder."

I made the first downward line, feeling my face scrunch up as I saw how horribly un-straight it was. The next one was better and thankfully, the circle between them only took a tiny twist of the wrist to achieve and not so much as a exhale from Sam at the movement.

"You're doing fine, Terry, just take it at your own time," Sam murmured and I looked up as I heard something under the gentle words. His eyes were shut and I bit my lip, hoping he wasn't getting a memory that was in any way, shape or form related to what I was doing to him.

"At least your brother doesn't bellyache at the slightest little scratch," Bobby said, either trying to distract Sam and I, or trying to annoy Dean, I couldn't tell which.

"That would be because she's cutting about one-eighth deep and you drove the damned blade in half-an-inch," Dean shot back at him.

"Not bleeding out, are ya?"

"I would be if I didn't have so much friggin' anti-freeze in my system!"

"Done," I said, leaning right back from Sam, the blade held up and away.

He opened his eyes and looked down, automatically checking what he could see of the ward against the drawing held loosely in my lap.

"Thanks."

"Don't…_thank_ me," I said, shuddering again. If I never had to do that again, it would be too soon.

Dean tossed him a clean, wet cloth and picked up the bottle of whiskey sitting on the table, getting up and walking over to me.

"Take a belt," he told me as he handed it to me. "It'll settle everything down."

I could smell the sharp, acrid whiskey odour from two feet away and privately doubted it would do any more than make me want to lose my breakfast, but I reached out for the bottle anyway, closing my eyes, and tipping it up as the rim hit my mouth. The taste was as foul as I'd imagined, but the fire that ripped down my throat certainly took my mind off blood and knives and any other thought past the sudden certainty that he'd given me a bottle of gasoline to drink and I'd actually drunk some.

Shoving the bottle back at him, I closed my eyes and struggled to get in a breath past the fumes that filled my throat, the taste that seared my tongue into insensibility and the heat that seemed to infuse my entire body. I suppose, to someone watching, it might've even looked funny, me coughing and sputtering and waving my hands around as I tried to get a decent breath into my chest which had obviously forgotten what that it was supposed to be making air go in and out.

It was fortunate that none of them laughed. Bobby gave me a slap on the back and I nodded to him as the effects began to dissipate. Dean'd been right, after a fashion. Nothing had settled but I wasn't thinking that I'd just cut a symbol into a living person's body like some hinky serial killer anymore either.

Dean poured a couple of inches into a glass and handed it to his brother. Picking up the scalpel, Sam swirled it around in the alcohol and looked at me. I looked back at him uncomprehendingly.

"Sorry, but you need to come, and Crowley and Cas can't see you either," Bobby said, face crunching up a bit. "You'll bring Ellie back here and the two of you can get into the panic room and stay there while we find Crowley."

"What?"

My inability to take in what he was saying was due to a couple of things. Firstly, no one had mentioned that I was supposed to be going along. Secondly, no one had mentioned that I was getting a set of front-and-back scars. No one had mentioned freaking anything about those things at all. So, of course my brain had shut down.

"It doesn't hurt that much," Sam said, waiting with the dripping scalpel held up in front of him.

I guess he was trying to be reassuring but _wow_, so not.

"Shirt off, Dorothy," Dean added with a very, very faint smirk and it was that expression that broke through all my no-they-couldn't-mean-it and I-must-be-misunderstanding and are-they-speaking-a-different-language thoughts.

I looked down and unbuttoned my shirt to just below my bra, pulling it down off my shoulders. Looking at Sam, I asked, "Is that enough room?"

He nodded and leaned forward, and the scalpel stung as he sliced through the thin skin over my breastbone. Perfect, I thought to myself, looking rigidly over his shoulder at the far wall. _Won't a swimsuit look just fantastic with this little number in the middle of my chest_? I could forget about evening gowns as well.

It hurt. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't hurt to get cut by a scalpel because they're lying. It just takes a bit of time to start hurting because the blade's so fine that the nerves don't seem register the cut until the air hits the opening wound. I could feel the thin threads of liquid running down my skin and soaking into my bra, I could even smell the slightly metallic scent of my blood as it pooled between my breasts and dribbled down to my stomach, my shirt absorbing a lot of it where I was still clutching it in front of me. After a couple of moments, it was aching and stinging so much that I started grinding my teeth again, trying to find anything that would stop the pain from filling my eyes with tears.

"Done," Sam said, lifting the blade away and taking the damp washcloth from Bobby and handing it to me. "Turn around."

I held the cold cloth to my chest and swivelled around on my butt until I was facing away from him. There was a scrape of his chair as he moved closer and his fingers brushed against my back to pull the shirt down a little more. They were warm but the scalpel blade was ice-cold.

The back hurt a LOT more than the front. Both Dean and Bobby found something else to do as the first tear spilled out and rolled down my cheek. I know, _I know_, but it really did hurt, and since I was desperately clenching my teeth together to stop myself from saying anything – or screaming – it was the only release I could find.

I heard the clunk of the scalpel dropping back into the glass behind me, then felt a cool, moist cloth sponging my back and smarting along the cuts horrendously as Sam cleaned up the running blood there.

He pulled the shirt up over my shoulders and I looked down, pulling the edges together and re-buttoning it and trying to ignore the round stain of blood in the middle and the tears dripping from my face onto my hands.

"Alright, let's get this show on the road," Dean said, turning away and plunking the bottle back on the table.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Where is she?" Bobby snapped, looking at the empty alley.

"This the address?" Dean asked, pulling his gun out, the snick of the hammer being cocked loud between the buildings.

The alley was a dog-leg between the main street and a semi-diagonal cross street, the buildings to either side three or four storeys high. Several dumpsters lined the walls on both sides but the traffic noises from the streets were muted here, and the sunshine seemed to heat up the narrow space, cooking the garbage in the overflowing trash cans and dumpsters, giving off a nauseating odour.

"This is where she said," Bobby said, more quietly. He pulled out his phone. "I'll try her again."

The ringing was immediate and close, and we looked around, picking up the location almost all together. It was coming from behind the two furthest dumpsters.

I slowed as I saw the woman's body sprawled in the tiny gap between the big metal bins, leaning back against a mound of plastic trash bags. She had dark blonde hair, streaked with lighter tones, her skin pale with an unhealthy flush to it, and her clothes torn and grubby. Against the pale coat she wore, the red stain spreading out from under her hand was very bright. She looked so like the actress who'd played Eleanor Visyak in the dragon episode, I couldn't get my mind to accept that _here_, she really was a creature from another dimension, _and_ a badly injured woman that Bobby clearly cared about, at the same time.

"El?"

"Hey. I guess I could've used your help after all," she said, opening her eyes slowly and looking at him. A spasm hit the muscles in her face and her eyelids fluttered shut again, her hand pressing more tightly against her stomach.

"Just be still," Bobby soothed, staring down at the spreading red pool under her fingers worriedly. "Sam, get the medic –"

"No, Bobby," Eleanor said quietly, her eyes snapping open. "Get a container."

"What happened?" Sam asked, leaning closer to them.

She looked up past Bobby, her face white and tired. "They took me. I got away."

"Oh, Ellie. What have they done to you?" Bobby said, and his voice was so full of regret that I couldn't look at him.

"Everything," she told him with a slightly breathless laugh. "The demon I could've handled, but when the angel stepped in, I –" She stopped and let out her breath heavily. "I told him, Bobby. They have enough to crack Purgatory wide open."

Bobby bowed his head for a moment, then looked back at her. "Tell me. I need to know."

Her inhale hissed as she looked past him. "Get a container, Bobby," she repeated and he turned his head a bit, catching my eye and nodding. I swung around and hurried back to the cars. "They need virgin blood. That's a milk-run for them. And they need the blood of a Purgatory native, and well, they've got plenty of that now."

Behind me, I heard Dean ask, "Where are they?"

I couldn't hear the answer as I rummaged in the back seat of the Nova for a clean jar in Bobby's medical kit. There were two and I picked up the larger one, hurrying back to them and handing it to Bobby.

"I'm sorry, Bobby," Eleanor was saying to Bobby, her eyelids sagging.

"No, it's okay," he told her. "It's okay."

"I'm…sorry, really sorr–"

Her face went slack, all the animation gone from it, and Bobby blinked, looking down at her. "El?"

In the narrow alley, the beating sound of wings was loud and we all spun around, looking at Cas who stood a few feet away, between us and the cars.

"I'm sorry this had to happen," he said, to Dean, I think. Bobby got up, his hands empty and his face darkening. "Crowley got carried away."

"Yeah, I _bet_ it was all Crowley you son of a bitch!" Bobby snarled at the angel. He lunged forward and Dean's hand shot out, restraining him.

Dean looked at Cas coldly. "You don't even see it, do you? How totally off the rails you are!"

"Enough! I don't care what you think," Castiel said, and I thought it was kind of human the way he lied about that. "I've tried to make you understand. You won't listen. So let me make this simple. Please, go home and let me stop Raphael. I won't ask again," he added, staring at the brothers.

"Well, good, 'cause I think you already know the answer," Dean snapped back.

The angel's face hardened and he turned his head to look at me. "And you. You have to go."

There was a definite emotion in his voice when he said it and I took a step backwards involuntarily, hitting the edge of the dumpster with my back. Dean and Sam and Bobby didn't even look at each other, just closed up together in front of me in unison, answering the angel's threat with a clear intention of their own.

"I wish it hadn't come to this," Cas said, shaking his head at them. "Well rest assured, when this is all over, I will save Sam, but only if you stand down."

"Save Sam from what?" Dean asked him suspiciously. Cas disappeared.

He reappeared right behind Sam, touching him before I could even open my mouth to warn either brother, and Sam collapsed onto the ground as the angel turned and took a step toward me.

"Castiel."

It might've been the only thing that could've stopped Cas then. Balthazar stood in the alley, his usual smirk gone, dark blood spattered over his normally immaculate clothing and a dull glint from the silver sword he held loosely in one hand.

It was exactly like the moment in the alternative timeline when everything froze into immobility. Dean and Bobby were standing to one side of Cas, Sam on the ground near their feet, Cas had paused in the movement of taking another step closer to me and my heart was high in my throat, pounding so hard it felt like my eyeballs were shaking from it.

"You too, Balthazar?" Cas grated at him, turning away from me and back to the other angel, a sword identical to the one Balthazar carried dropping from the sleeve of his trenchcoat into his hand.

"You've gone too far, Cassie," Balthazar said gently.

I couldn't even work out what happened next, the action so fast I couldn't track it. I couldn't move, could hardly breathe, then there was a flash of brilliant light and I screwed up my eyes, stumbling sideways away from it, and a man's cry was followed by a much bigger flash.

Cas disappeared and Balthazar lay on the ground near Sam, his sword next to him, the end of it bloody.

"Sam!" Dean dropped to his brother's side as Bobby stepped over Balthazar to help me up.

"Look," I said, looking at the dead angel. Balthazar's left hand had opened partially and Bobby dropped to his knees to prise the piece of paper from it.

"Get that jar filled," he said to me over his shoulder as he read it. "As much as you can."

You know, I didn't even think of how gross it was to be filling a mason jar with a dead woman's blood, just picked up the jar and knelt beside Eleanor, pulling her coat and shirt aside and pushing the mouth of the jar against her skin, the blood dripping into the glass slowly. Maybe it was the action, or the unreality of what had happened, or the fear gnawing at me that Castiel had really meant to send me home, but I didn't register that I was draining a woman of her blood as carefully as any vampire.

"Godammit, Sam! Wake up," Dean muttered to his brother, his arm under Sam's shoulders as he half-lifted him up, his thumb pushing up one of Sam's eyelids to look at his eye.

"Why did Cas leave?" I asked Bobby in a low voice.

"Balthazar wounded him," Bobby said shortly, picking up the short silver sword and putting the paper into his pocket. "And he came up with Crowley's location."

"Bobby!"

"Let's get him into the car," Bobby said decisively, going to Sam's feet as Dean nodded and moved around to lift his brother's shoulders.

I had to tilt Eleanor over to get the blood moving faster but the jar was nearly full.

"Terry," Bobby called out to me a moment later and I put the lid on the jar and got up, wondering if I should cover the body or just leave it. It didn't even occur to me that I'd left fingerprints all over her skin and clothing, until way later, you know, although thinking about it now, I don't suppose finding them there would've have told the police anything. I'd never been printed in my life at home, and I didn't exist in this world until a few weeks ago.

"You ride in the back with Sam," Bobby said tersely to me as Dean got into the driver's side.

I handed him the jar and hurried to the rear door of Dean's car, opening it and clambering in awkwardly as the Impala's engine started up.

Perching on the edge of the seat beside Sam, I picked up his hand and held it as Dean reversed out of the alley, seeing Bobby climb into the Nova and follow us out.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

The sun was setting, filling one side of the car with a deep gold light as we sped north back to Sioux Falls. It'd taken four hours to drive down but we made it back in three, Bobby's headlights steady behind us the whole way.

"How is he?" Dean asked me.

"The same," I told him. I'd given him the same answer each time he'd asked and his mouth flattened out as he looked back at the road.

Sam's pulse was erratic. It speeded up and slowed down, not missing beats but behaving more like he was awake and involved in a high-speed chase than lying motionless on the back seat of his brother's car. Behind his shut eyelids, his eyes were moving, like he was dreaming and sometimes his breathing sped up or slowed down as well.

I'd run out of scripts and out of outlines and I didn't know what was going on. The producer had told us months ago that the season would end with the world not being saved by the Winchesters and a much greater threat coming out in the last episode, the beasts that had been locked away in Purgatory but aside from the name – Leviathan – that was all I had. There'd been nothing in that meeting about Sam's wall or the angel breaking it or anything I could use to help Sam or even guess how bad this could be.

After two hours of wracking my memories for anything helpful about Sam, I tried to think of what I knew about the other threat from the angel. Bobby had pulled out two books for me when Lisa had been at the house, an old version of the bible and a quasi-religious text on Christian myth that had basically said that the Leviathan were supposed to be God's first attempt at complex life-forms and had proved entirely too successful so He'd created a locked room for them and shoved them in. Not real helpful.

We pulled into the yard just after seven p.m. and Dean and Bobby carried Sam down to the iron panic room. He hadn't moved or changed at all in the drive, and Dean stood beside the iron cot, looking down at him.

"Sammy? Come on, snap out of it," he said, sitting on the edge of the thin mattress.

Bobby tugged at my arm and we turned away, leaving the brothers alone.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I followed Bobby down the steps to the basement slowly. Everything was ready and I knew Bobby wanted to go. He was worried about Dean, worried about Sam but more worried that Cas and Crowley were about to open a doorway to the end of the world.

Dean was pacing around the cot when Bobby stopped inside the doorway and looked at Sam.

"Anything?"

Dean shook his head in frustration. "I can't just sit here, Bobby. I've got to help him."

"Dean."

"You know," Dean ignored that, looking around distractedly. "Dreamscape his noggin. Something!"

"You know what Cas did," Bobby said reasonably, calmly. "The dam inside your brother's head is gone, and all Hell's spilling loose. We don't what's going on inside."

"I don't care," Dean grated, swinging around to look at him desperately. "We have got to do something!"

"And we will," Bobby promised, probably a bit rashly, but he was trying to get through to the man in front of him. "But right now we got sixteen hours 'til they pop Purgatory. I'm down one man. I can't afford to be down two."

I've never been as scared as I was right then when the idea occurred to me. I thought I'd been terrified in the back hall of the bar, when the monsters had come in but I realised now that had been barely a shiver compared to this. My throat was tight and my tongue was thick and dry and I thought if I didn't get the words out fast, I wouldn't be able to do it all in another few seconds.

"Do you still have any of the dream root that Bela got for you?" I asked Bobby.

He glanced at me. "Why?"

"I could do it."

"Do what?" Bobby said, turning and frowning at me. Dean just kept pacing.

"Take the dreamroot, go into Sam's head and try and help him," I said nervously. "At least try and keep him from imploding while you two save the world from the monsters."

At that, Dean stopped dead and stared at me. "And if he implodes anyway and takes you with him?" he asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "He's not _dreaming_, he's _remembering_!"

I don't know what happened just then but suddenly the fear vanished and I felt angry, really angry. Maybe it was because I'm not a brave person normally and it'd taken all my admittedly meagre store of courage to even offer the idea and he'd shot it down as if it'd been totally stupid and my back and chest were hurting like the devil and I wanted to him to look at me, just once, with something other than scorn in those wary green eyes.

"I'm not crazy about the idea but I can't help Bobby stop Purgatory from opening and you can. Someone has to stay here with Sam and Cas might wait before coming for me, or he might not, but I'd be safer in there with Sam than I would be out here because I don't think Cas can send me back if I'm not – uh – not all in one piece!"

Dean looked like I'd slapped him, his mouth half-open and Bobby nodded slowly.

"You might be right about that," he said, keeping his gaze on my face.

"Or if he does show up he might kill her and that'll kill Sam if she's in there with him!" Dean yelled at him, obviously deciding that I wasn't worth arguing with. "This is a stupid friggin' idea and –"

"An' what?" Bobby said, looking at him. "We're on the clock, Dean, we gotta go now. Balthazar died to give us the information on Crowley's hideout and it's a five-hour drive from here."

"Fine!"

"Good!"

"Okay," I said, much more quietly than either of them. "Where's the dream root?"

"In the car," Dean said, heading for the door. As soon as he'd left, Bobby walked to Sam and pulled out his knife, cutting a few hairs from Sam's head.

"Dean's right, Terry, this could be a really, _really_ bad idea," he said quietly as he dropped them into a glass and filled a jug with water from the sink.

I nodded straight away, my teeth beginning to chatter softly inside my mouth. "I know, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of choice, does there? What else can we do?"

I figured that because of Sam's feelings, he might listen to me, if I could find him inside of whatever was going on in his head. I thought Dean would've had a better chance of reaching through to his brother, but Bobby couldn't just handle Crowley and Cas by himself. And I had no more blueprints to work out a different way and there was no time to look for a different way anyway.

We both startled a bit when we heard the upstairs door bang shut, turning to the door at the sound of Dean thundering down the steps.

"Here," he said. He tossed the bag of gnarled brown roots at Bobby and stopped in front of me. It seemed like he'd made some kind of peace with the idea because his face was deadly serious.

"You gotta remember that in there, nothing is real but anything can kill you," he said in a low voice, and my teeth chattered together a bit more loudly as I wondered if he was trying to put me off. "You can't find your way through someone's dreams or thoughts like you do in the real world. Sometimes just thinking about what you to see or where you want to be takes you there. You have to remember that – that it's make-believe, right?"

"Like, um, in the Matrix?" I suggested, looking down at the glass Bobby held out to me, filled with an unappetising sludge of brown liquid that smelled like ditch-water.

"Without all the mumbo-jumbo and emo clothes, yeah, a bit like that," he said, relieved, I thought, that I'd gotten the gist of it. "So you can make the jump, no matter how impossible it looks, right?"

"Right."

He turned for the desk and picked up the paper Bobby had taken from Balthazar, pushing it into my hand. "If he wakes up, this is where we'll be."

I lifted the glass and swallowed against the gag reflex that the smell brought, closing my eyes and tipping the contents into my mouth and swallowing as fast as I could. _I'm gonna bring this all back up again_, I thought frantically as I felt one of Sam's hairs touch the back of my throat.

Opening my eyes, I realised I was alone.

Then I felt the heat.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

* * *

I turned around.

I was in a house, but it was weird because it was almost blurry, as if I stood in a photograph that had been taken while the camera was moving slightly – or, I thought slowly, turning around, as if I was in a memory that wasn't really a memory so much as what a person had been told was a memory, an idea that had been passed along. It was hard to focus on anything and after a minute or two, my eyes started to ache a bit.

The room was a bedroom, bright blue with white trim. A boy's bedroom, I thought, seeing the cowboy and car themes here and there. The heat was coming from the door that led into the rest of the house. Light flickered and glowed around the door's edges.

The house in Lawrence, I wondered? I backed away from the door, and turned and looked out the window. There was the dead tree in the front yard. And parked alongside the kerb, the Impala was waiting for whoever had brought it here. Not Dean, I was guessing.

"Sam?"

I swear they hadn't been there five minutes before, but now the walls were covered in pictures – photographs – some large, some small, all framed and hanging close together. Walking over to the wall, the first one I looked at was a photograph of a young boy, maybe eight or nine years old, holding a slender rifle and grinning at the camera, dark hair mostly hidden beneath a red baseball cap. The next one was of a man, unmistakably John Winchester, his expression uncharacteristically gentle as he looked out of the frame, his face younger, jaw shadowed in stubble. Not photographs, not really, I thought.

Sam's _memories_.

"Sam!" I called out louder, turning back to the door. Bad enough I was intruding in the guy's head, I told myself, he didn't need me to be looking through his most personal moments as well.

I couldn't see the light around the edges of the door anymore and I reached out for the doorknob cautiously. It felt cool.

Opening it, I could see a hall, and I stepped through.

The house tilted and went dark and I found myself on my butt, sliding down a long, slippery slope without being able to see or hear a thing. And yes, okay, I admit it. I screamed. I screamed my head off, and when the lights came back on and I was standing in a grassy area, sunlight streaming through the leaves of the trees around me, my scream trailed away to a hoarse croak, thankfully unnoticed by the people walking around the area, armfuls of books and minding their own business.

I haven't been to the Stanford campus in California, but I had the feeling that's where I was, a sense that was only strengthened when I saw a tall, athletic-looking blonde girl walking fast toward me. I didn't even time to see for certain if it was who I thought it was, before it all went dark again and this time I was thrown, upside-down and whipped around until I thought I was going to heave from the violent motion. _Now you know how a shirt feels in a tumble-dryer_, I thought, somewhat incoherently and totally irrelevantly, as I tried to reach out for anything to grab onto.

The flames were bright and hot and her face was contorted by such agony I wanted to close my eyes and never open them again. I couldn't. They remained fixed open, out of my control, staring up and my throat was reverberating with what might have been a scream or a shout but what felt like something hard and sharp and rough, reaching in and pulling out my heart. I know how that sounds, believe me, I do, but that is as close as I can possibly come to describing that second, before hard hands grabbed my shoulders and dragged me off the bed and out of the room.

Dread and horror spread like sticky honey through my insides as I stared at Dean, his forehead bloody from a long cut, his expression begging me not to ask anything, not to ask anything else, mouth twisted up in a half-smile that told me he knew that plea was already too late. It hadn't been a dream, when I'd woken on the old mattress.

The acrid bite of whiskey on my tongue and down my throat, the heat of the liquid failing to do anything to drown out the deep-seated pain that seemed to be in my blood somehow, pumping around my body. Dean's face, shuttered and turning away as I asked him how he could care so little about himself, the expression wiped away by relief when his phone shrilled.

A light blinded me, pure white and heatless, but piercing through my screwed-shut eyes and the arm I'd lifted over my face. I turned my head away from it and saw Dean, torn up and bloody and horribly still, lying on the floor. The light disappeared and I felt a rage like a tornado, filling me up with pure hatred. Looking across the room and seeing a familiar-looking woman with blonde hair and a red leather jacket backing away.

_God, I'm _in_ Sam's memories_, I thought, seeing his life the way he had. Knowing that didn't help with getting out of it, and I struggled frantically against moving as he got to his feet and advanced us both closer to Ruby's body, possessed by now by Lilith. I looked down and saw the bone-handled knife in my hand, shuddering at the feel of it. As Sam lifted the knife and Ruby's mouth opened, I was plucked free and tossed aside.

Agonising pain filled me and I shrieked out, one arm swinging wide and feeling my hand knocking things down, hearing the sounds of breaking glass and smelling the sharp, sweet-sour scent of spilled bourbon rising around me, then I was falling, landing on a bed that was crumpled and stained, sour with the scent of dried sweat and catching the whiff further away of old vomit.

Step away, I kept telling myself, pitched headfirst into darkness again. _Step away from him, and just freaking watch, _don't _participate_. Like most advice you give to yourself in the middle of a crisis, it sounded good but I had no idea of how to do it.

I felt as if I were being stretched and pummelled, pushed and thrown and shoved and pulled through scenes I could barely register before the next appeared. All of them had a single thing in common. They were filled with such a torturous pain I could hardly get a breath in past it.

I haven't had the easiest of lives. My parents were killed, years ago, in a collision with a truck that had passed the state inspection with faulty brake lines and a worn-through clutch. It hadn't mattered all that much to me that the company that owned the truck was fined for its negligence. At the time, I'd been moved from my home and everything I knew, parked with my uncle and aunt in California and from then on, pretty much left to myself. Don't get me wrong, they're good people, and they tried hard but I was nine and it wasn't a good time to lose everything. When is?

But my pain literally disappeared with what I was…seeing? Feeling? Experiencing in every flavour of virtual reality possible?... in comparison to this, my life had been a cake-walk. Nothing I'd experienced in my short life could've prepared me for what Sam had gone through, had felt, done, seen and lived.

_What?! No, say it!_ Fear that pounded like the world's worst migraine, eyes full of tears – _I know how sorry you are. I do. But, man...you were the one that I depended on the most. And you let me down in ways that I can't even..._ So much shame, I wanted to die right along with him, wanted to take it all back, take it all back and never look at it again– _I'm in no shape to be hunting. I need to step back, 'cause I'm dangerous. Maybe it's best we just...go our separate ways_. A decision that felt half responsible, half relief, and no way of knowing if it was the right thing or running or what his brother would say– _I do know that no one has ever done anything so bad that they can't be forgiven_. Struggling to swallow down the hysterical laughter that had burst up and the sudden urge to tell someone, someone not _Dean_, exactly how it'd been, what he'd done and the zero chance of ever being forgiven for it…

It went on and on and some of the things that had happened, that he thought and said and did, I knew about, had seen in the slightly distorted view the writers – or whichever of the writers it was who seemed to be tapping into the brothers – had given the audience on the show, but some things I hadn't seen and they were a lot darker and a lot more terrifying; things Sam had done with Ruby, things he'd done trying to bargain Dean out of Hell, things he'd done without a soul to guide him.

"Sam! SAM!" I kept calling out, kept trying to hold on, but it was like shouting in a hurricane, and I was getting so tired I could hardly stay upright when I landed, for want of a better word, in each memory, each moment.

A road, the Impala stopped in the middle, a dark-haired woman getting out. _Black_. A forest, open spaces between the trees. _Black_.

BANG! I hit the floor on my hands and knees, and lifted my head, looking around at the peace and quiet of the room around me. Bobby's place. I was in the living room of Bobby's place.

"Sam?"

"Terry?"

My throat closed up tightly at the sound of his voice, so close and actually answering me. Getting to my feet, I nearly tripped with my first step, my legs were wobbling so much.

"Terry, stay _away_," he called out, and his voice was deep, holding a warning.

Kitchen, I thought, forcing myself across the hall and through the dining room doors, stopping in shock when I saw him. And the _other_ him.

Sam stood near the small table in the kitchen, and he also leaned against the counter holding the sink. That one, the second Sam, looked weary and old, beaten and broken.

"Sam…"

"Terry, you have to get out," Sam said, taking a step closer to himself. "I have to do this. You can't be here."

"Sam, don't…wait…" I grabbed the back of a dining room chair as he took another step. I don't know why I was so worried about him, getting closer to that other Sam, the knife in his hand winking as the light caught the edge, but the sense of danger, of alarm and just wrongess was overpowering, driving me forward.

"GET OUT OF HERE!" Sam turned and shouted at me suddenly, and I flinched back from the despair in that roar. He meant to kill the other Sam, I could see, and with a much-needed flash of understanding, I knew what that meant, what happened, what _would_ happen.

"NO!"

I lurched forward across the floor at the same time he strode toward his other self, watching helplessly as he plunged the blade in. There was a burst of light and heat and flames and his head tipped back, the other Sam disappearing as I reached out desperately.

"Sam, hold on!"

I grabbed his arm, shocked at the rigidity of it, then everything disappeared in a throbbing sulphur-yellow light and the crackle of fire.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Lucifer's Cage, the prison he'd been thrown into way back whenever, was made of ice but that didn't stop the pits and wells of fire from burning, light everywhere as the flames were reflected in the translucent pillars and frozen walls. Blue and gold were the only colours I could register, and red. There was a lot of red. I had a hold of Sam's wrist, I could feel it, solid under my fingers, but where I was standing, to one side of the inverted bowl of ice and fire, Sam wasn't there, he was in front of me, fighting with his brother. Adam didn't look like Adam at all. Taller and broader, his eyes had changed colour, a fierce electric blue, and they were narrowed in the ferocious expression on his face.

"Sam, hold onto me, we can get out," I shouted at them, my heart hammering somewhere in my throat with fear. I could feel my sweat trickling down the back of my neck, down my sides and I couldn't move my feet at all. "Sam!"

Neither of them paid me the slightest attention and it took me a few minutes to realise that this wasn't _happening_, this _had_ happened, it was another memory. You must be thinking by now that I'm pretty stupid, but I have to tell you, it's hard to keep logical and sane when you're in someone else's head.

I could hear screaming, but not with my ears. My ears were just hearing the grunts and hard, thudding impacts of the angels as they grappled and gouged at each other, opening holes in Sam's body, in Adam's, their fists driving inside and tearing out organs and bone and spraying blood over everything. The screaming was deeper, further away, and I thought it might have been Sam and Adam, feeling those wounds, feeling themselves being ripped apart from the inside out.

As a kid, I'd seen a dog-fight, two dump yard dogs going at each other, both ready to kill. That was what watching this fight was like. They didn't care if they tore each apart. Maybe that was the point, the maximum damage to the souls that were trapped in there with them, I don't know. It was sickening to see, but the hatred between them was worse.

_You were _weak_, Daddy's little soldier, no mind or will of your own, weak, cowardly, hiding behind orders, doing what you what you were told, spineless, mindless – _Arrogant_, self-centred, child! Never any thought for anyone else, just what you wanted, what you thought was your right, you _ruined_ everything, brought down his wrath and drove him away, for pride, little brother, just for your childish _pride_ –_

I tried to shut out their poisonous words, and the feelings behind them which were far worse.

"Sam! It's just a memory, it's not real –"

"It's so real I can't find my way out," Sam said, beside me again, but not whole, not himself, not really. He turned his head to look at me, and he was blistered and burned over the whole of his body, lacerated by deep gouges that flowed with blood. He arched backward, as if someone had stabbed him from behind, though no one was there, his teeth were clenched together tightly and my fingers slid from his wrist, locking around his fingers which just about crushed my whole hand inside of them. The pain helped, shocking me out of the memory for a second and I caught a glimpse of Bobby's kitchen.

"SAM!" I shouted at him and he burst into flame. I nearly let go then, the heat and the awful smell surrounding me and I could feel the fire licking over my skin, could feel and _taste_, at the back of my throat, my hand and arm cooking. "SAM!"

"Get out Terry, let me go and get out!"

"NO! You have to come with me," I screamed at him and tightened my hold on his hand, pulling him with me as I took a step back. "Come on!"

"I can't!"

"Yes, you can!"

The flames were reaching higher up my arm, and I had a horrible feeling that if they overwhelmed me, I'd be as lost in here as he was. I started back again, jerking him after me, my paltry weight not having much effect on him but he was moving, a little bit at a time. "COME ON!"

"I deserved this…"

And I suddenly realised what he was doing. Again, you must think I'm slow, but honestly, it hadn't occurred to me before, that he might welcome the pain, the memory of the pain, welcome it to try and redeem himself.

I ignored the fire as best as I could, stepping back toward him, feeling it crisp my face, smelling the ends of my hair smouldering in that vicious heat.

"Sam, you don't deserve this, you put him back, you paid," I said to him as clearly as I could. "You saved the world, you saved your brother, it's over. Come back with me, please!"

"No, I –" He looked confused, his expression almost melting in the flames that burned through him.

"Yes, you paid, Sam," I said, wondering what else I could say that would get through. "Dean needs you, Sam. He-he-he's forgiven you, for what happened, for everything," I kept going, hoping like hell that was completely true. I didn't know exactly what else had happened between them, I was just going off what I'd seen on the show, but I knew for certain that Dean didn't want his brother lost to him. "He and Bobby, they're alone, trying to keep Purgatory closed, he needs you, Bobby needs you!"

"I…"

"Sam!" I could see his doubts, filling up that melting face. It was taking every bit of bravery I had to keep from running from that sight, and even now, I have no idea how I did it.

"Terry?"

We were standing in Bobby's kitchen, flames roaring around us, burning up the cupboards and boiling over the ceiling.

"Sam, please, come on, let it go," I said, pulling at his hand. He wasn't burning up anymore but he looked terrible, his skin all blackened and charred and fissured, clear liquid seeping out of the cracks. "Let it go."

"He…forgives…me?"

"Yes." I told him, forcing certainty into my voice. I swallowed against the heaving of my stomach and stepped close to him, putting my arms around him and trying to ignore the smell. "Yes, he does. Let it go, Sam and come home."

He let out a deep breath, the tension sliding from him as his arms lifted and enclosed me slowly.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I woke up abruptly, my head pounding and throbbing, nausea swirling in my stomach. There was a crackle against my hand and I looked down at the paper in my hand. The note gave an address, in Dean's handwriting. Beside me, on the cot, Sam was sitting up, holding his head gingerly.

The reassuring dark walls and Bobby's poster of Bo Derek were the most welcoming sight I'd ever seen.

"What happened?" Sam asked softly, turning his head slowly to look at me.

"Castiel broke your wall," I said, feeling an icepick stab through my brain behind my eye. No one had mentioned the hangover of the freaking dream root on the show.

"Painkillers?" I asked, looking at him through squinted eyes.

He pressed a hand against his forehead and waved a hand in the general direction of Bobby's desk and I got up, walking slowly over to the desks, feeling as if I might shatter into a million pieces if I put my feet down too hard. Unlike the Winchesters, my pain threshold is not high. In fact, I usually cry if I stub my toe. This was a whole new lesson in dealing with things I never thought I'd have to.

The bottle was on the shelf behind the desk and I shook two out, dry-swallowing them with a lot of difficulty as I handed another two to Sam. He seemed to take them without any trouble at all.

"Where's Dean?" Sam grated at me, and I smoothed out the paper.

"221 Piermont Ave, Bootbock, Kansas," I told him, reading the address on the paper again then closing my eyes. The Tylenol would take at least ten minutes to work, I thought, and we should have something to eat before we went after them.

"I'll drive," Sam said, getting to his feet and following me as I walked toward the door.

"No way," I told him over my shoulder. "What you just did, Sam…you're going to get flashbacks and disconnects until it settles down properly, I'm driving."

It wasn't bravado and it wasn't some misplaced hero-complex. I just figured that once the pain of my headache went, and I had something solid in my stomach, I'd be okay for the drive, which was going to take at least five hours. Sam, on the other hand, had just done some kind of mental reintegration and I thought if he could sleep for a part of the way, it would help with smoothing whatever rough edges that had caused.

"Can you eat?" I asked him as we walked into the kitchen. I looked around surreptitiously, glad to see no scorch marks on the cupboards or smoke stains on the ceiling. I knew it'd been a dream, a hallucination almost, but it had felt so real at the time that I couldn't stop myself from rubbing my hand over my arm, feeling over the smooth skin there for the blisters and charred skin.

"A little, maybe," Sam said cautiously, looking around. His memories of seeing himself here were also disorientating him, I realised, watching his wariness.

"Sandwich," I decided, pointing to the table. "Sit down."

I got him a bottle of water from the fridge and went to the counter to get bread. The headache was beginning to get fuzzy, the pain receding slowly. I didn't feel all there, really, but it was a relief to be able to see clearly again without the light hurting.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

I cranked the engine again and it tried, it really did, but there was no follow-through. Leaning toward me, Sam tapped the dash and I looked at the fuel gauge.

Empty.

I groaned. I couldn't help it. What else could go wrong, I wondered, probably unwisely.

"The truck," Sam said, looking through the window beside him. "We'll take that."

Bobby's tow-truck had a few more bits and pieces than I was used to seeing in a car, but Sam pointed out the usual things. "Don't touch anything else," he added, leaning back between the seat and the door. I nodded, turning the key and starting the engine and to my relief it rumbled straight away and the gears and pedals did what I expected them to.

The I-29 led almost due south from Sioux Falls to Bootbock and there wasn't much traffic on it. I kept the speed at a steady sixty-five, checking the mirrors for the highway patrol cars and hoping that we wouldn't get pulled over. I'd been shocked to find that Sam and I had been out for almost five hours, and I was hoping that Dean and Bobby were still alive, and would still be in one piece when we got there.

On the seat between us, the small cooler held a jar of Eleanor's blood, another jar of blood that had been in Bobby's fridge and which I was trying not to think about too much, and bags and small boxes of herbs, rocks and powders that I'd found in the panic room. Bobby had done a copy of Eleanor's ritual to open the doors for them before they'd left, and I made another before we took off. The eclipse had started, the radio told us in vapidly cheery tones, the moon would be totally occluded in another couple of hours and the eclipse would be over in a bit over five hours. It did not give us much time.

Glancing sideways at Sam, I was relieved to see his eyes closed. Random images kept popping into my mind and I was having a lot of trouble keeping them out, and my attention on the road. It was hard to believe that Sam had been able to stay on his feet, given all that he'd been through, let alone walk and function as well as he was. John had made his sons tough, I knew. Just hadn't realised how tough they really were.

You can talk about Hell and up here, in the real world, it's just another concept, you know. Just an idea, there's nothing to really judge it or measure it against in normal life. I'd thought, before all this, that people mostly made their own hells, with their choices and denials and doing things that were self-destructive but not seeing it. That probably held true, but Hell was a lot worse.

The physical things had been terrible but they didn't really hold a candle to what the mental torture was like. The angels had shredded every part of Sam that he'd been proud of, every part that he'd liked about himself and had left him with all the things he'd been ashamed of instead. I'd done a couple of things I'd been ashamed of in my life and I knew how it felt to go over and over them, not knowing how to make up for them, finally understanding that I had to do something about them, or go crazy. But for Sam, the things he'd been left with, the things he'd done, even with good intentions and trying to make it right, I wasn't sure he'd ever be able to find a way to do something about them. He felt every death that he was sure lay on him. He felt every bit of the destruction Lucifer had swept over the planet as if it was his personal responsibility. And he felt every moment of his brother's pain, in the moments when he'd chosen Ruby and what he thought was the end of it all, instead of listening to Dean.

"Terry," Sam said, and I startled a little, thinking he was asleep.

"Yes?"

"Thanks," he said, his voice so quiet I hardly heard the word. "For coming to get me."

I looked at the road. There hadn't been a choice in the matter. I couldn't have let him drown in his head alone.

"Dean wanted to go in and find you, Sam," I told him, trying to see him from the corner of my eye. "The only reason he didn't was that Bobby needed him."

"I know," he said, shifting up in the seat. "And I don't think I could've stood it, him being there, seeing…everything…like that."

I didn't know what to say to that. "He loves you, Sam."

"I know he does," Sam agreed, turning to look at me. "I know, but…he's everything I tried to be, growing up, and we don't – we're not like each other, practically at all. I…"

I waited for him to figure out what he wanted to say, wondering if he knew that he needed to be saying these things to his brother. They needed to be saying these things to each other, not a stranger from another dimension.

"I love him too, but I let him down," he continued finally. "I didn't…I wasn't…I thought he was…but he wasn't. He's never been. He's a lot stronger than I am."

The heart-break in his voice filled my eyes with tears and I blinked hard, trying to see the road through them.

"I understand why he couldn't tell me about Hell, now," he said a moment later, clearing his throat and looking away, out through the window. "I can't keep letting him down, can't let him see what happened to me, how-how bad it is."

I thought of them both, leaning on each other, needing someone to trust, someone to hold onto in the mess of their lives. In the show, Dean had come closest to telling Sam the truth of how badly he'd been broken in Hell, when he'd said that he wished he couldn't feel anything. I wondered now if he really had said to Sam, wondered if he'd really been that vulnerable with his brother.

"Sam," I said, my voice coming out cracked and raw because my throat felt as if it was full of broken glass. "You're both in the same place, and you can't keep trying to hide it from each other. No one is strong because they don't feel anything," I added, trying to work out what I was trying to say as the words were coming out. "They're strong because they keep fighting, keep trying, through those feelings. You kept going, he's still going, and you need to do it together, somehow."

He didn't answer that, one shoulder hunching up higher than the other as he turned a little more away.

I looked at my watch. Another two hours. I couldn't think of a way to convince him that both he and Dean would be stronger if they would just acknowledge that they were afraid, both of them, afraid of being left alone with no one.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"God, what happened?" Sam breathed as I pulled the truck up beside the overturned Impala.

"I don't know," I said, turning off the engine and opening the door. The stench of sulphur hit us both immediately and Sam's face hardened to stone.

I grabbed the cooler and followed him around the crushed black car, ducking down to look in the back seat as he did the same for the front. "Not here."

Sam nodded and turned for the building, a massive thing of concrete and brick that was like a great, hulking behemoth in the dim light. The moon had been totally covered and now it was showing a sliver again, but the light was faint.

We heard them before we got to the room, Sam stopping dead near the door, holding up his hand sharply.

"You're full of nuke. It's not safe. So, before the eclipse ends, let's get those souls back to where they belong," Dean said. His voice was deep and it echoed in the room past the door.

"Oh no, they belong with me."

Sam looked at me as we heard the angel's voice, gravelly but somehow not the same. _Too late_. The thought crossed both our minds and Sam gestured to the right, moving silently to the edge of the door frame and looking inside.

"No, Cas, it's it-it's scrambling your brain."

"I have not finished yet. Raphael had many followers, and I must punish them all severely," Castiel intoned, his voice devoid of emotion, and completely creepy. I didn't want to see what his face looked like.

"Listen to me," Dean said, and I heard him change his position slightly, boots scraping over the concrete floor. "Listen, I know there's a lot of bad water under the bridge, but we were family once. I'd have died for you. I almost did a few times. So if that means anything to you..." He hesitated and Sam slipped into the room. I inched my way to the door frame and knelt down, looking in at about knee-level. "Please. I've lost Lisa, I've lost Ben, and now I've lost Sam. Don't make me lose you too. You don't need this kind of juice anymore, Cas. Get rid of it before it kills us all."

Castiel stared at him, and I'd been right. His expression was cold and blank and completely creepy. "You're just saying that because I won. Because you're afraid."

Sam snuck up close behind him, picking up a short, silver angel sword from the floor.

"You're not my family, Dean. I have no family," Cas said, and I saw Dean's face twitch, the finality of the angel's words hitting him, the hurt of them showing in the way his eyes got darker.

Sam lifted the sword and plunged it into Cas' back, his face twisting up in pain as the blade went in, staggering backward from whatever had passed from angel through the sword and into him.

Cas reached behind him and pulled the blade out, looking at it without curiosity. The sword was clean and bright and he put it down. "I'm glad you made it, Sam. But the angel blade won't work, because I'm not an angel anymore," he said, his voice as eerily expressionless as ever, taking a step back so that he could see both brothers. "I am your new God. A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord. Or I shall destroy you."

That was enough for me, to be honest. I couldn't get into the room now, Cas could see the doorway I was hiding behind. I moved away from it and opened the cooler, pulling out the jars of blood and the drawing and instructions and biting my lip as I mixed the powders, crystals and herbs together.

"Well, all right then. Is this good, or you want the whole "forehead to the carpet" thing?" I heard Bobby's voice say, his breath whistling slightly in his throat. "Guys?"

"Stop," Cas said. It wasn't exactly anger in his voice, I thought, hurriedly pouring the blood over the mixture and stirring it with one finger. More like frustration or irritation. "What's the point if you don't mean it? You fear me. Not love, not respect, just fear."

"Cas..." Sam started to say, but the angel cut him off.

"Sam, you have nothing to say to me; you stabbed me in the back. You all betrayed me, everything I did for you." There was a pause and then he said, "Get up."

"Cas, come on, this isn't you." That was Dean again.

"The Castiel you knew is gone."

"So what, then? Kill us?" I could hear the desperation in Dean's voice, could hear him shifting his feet slightly as if he was thinking about attacking the angel.

"What a brave little ant you are. You know you're powerless, you wouldn't dare move against me again. That would be pointless. So I have no need to kill you. Not now," Castiel said, and I winced. He didn't sound like himself at all and I wondered about the Leviathan that had been in Purgatory along with the monster souls. Were they controlling him? Possessing him? How much was really left of Cas?

"Besides...once you were my favorite pets before you turned and bit me."

"Who are you?" Dean said disbelievingly.

"I am God. And if you stay in your place, you may live in my kingdom. If you rise up, I will strike you down," the angel answered him. I couldn't imagine what effect that had on Dean. There was another scrape on the floor of a shoe sole. "Not doing so well, are you Sam?"

Risking a peek around the door, I saw Sam stagger a little, shaking his head. "I'm fine..." he said, clearing his throat as he tried to stand straight. "I'm...fine."

Dean was looking at Sam and his gaze slid over the doorway I was crouched behind, checking as he noticed me and then moving back to Cas.

"You said you would fix him - you promised!" Dean grated at the angel.

"If you stood down, which you hardly did," Cas said, and this time there was definite emotion in his voice. "Be thankful for my mercy. I could have cast you back into the pit."

"Cas, come on, this is nuts! You can turn this around. Please!" Dean moved around the angel, and Cas moved to follow him, both a lot closer to the door. Dean looked at Sam and I saw Sam's slight nod.

I moved back to the ritual drawing on the wall, and picked up the incantation. I hadn't done Latin at school, and aside from the odd bits of Latin used in the show I had no idea of what I saying, but I tried to read it as clearly as possible.

_Ianua Magna Purgatorii  
Clausa Est Ob Nos  
Lumine Euius Ab Oculis  
Nostris Retento_

_Sed Nunc Stamus Ad Limen Huius_  
_Ianuae Magnae Et Demisse_  
_Fideliter Perhonorifice_  
_Paramus Aperire Eam_

_Creaturae Terrificae Quarum Ungulae_  
_Et Dentes Nunquam Tetigerunt_  
_Carnem Humanam Aperit Fauces_  
_Eius Ad Mundum Nostrum Nunc_  
_Ianua Magna_  
_Aperta Tandem!_

It wasn't subtle. The building began to shake and light outlined the edges of the circle I'd drawn on the wall. From the other room I heard Dean's voice shout out.

"Now!"

I was backing away when Sam shoved Cas through the doorway, arms wrapped around him, the angel's face twisting in rage as Dean grabbed his arm and swung him toward the searing light that was now pouring from the hole in the wall where the circle had been.

"NO!" The angel roared and his voice shattered the glass in the windows high on the walls, showering us in broken glass. The light poured out of the wall and through the angel and Sam, still holding him, and then it seemed to pull and stretch them both, and Dean and I recognised the danger at the same time.

Cas' face got longer and longer as he was drawn into the doorway, and Sam tried to let go. The angel's hand flashed out and grabbed his arm, holding him tight as Dean reached out and grabbed Sam's other hand, pulling back as hard as he could.

The angel saw me and his eyes widened. "YOU!"

I ducked away from that wild glare as Cas disappeared into the light and Sam's arm went with him. Dean was leaning back, hanging onto Sam's wrist and forearm in a death-grip, and Sam's face screwed up in pain as he was stretched between the angel and his brother, but he was being pulled inexorably into the light after Cas and Dean's boots were slipping on the floor, dragging him closer and closer to the light as well.

"BOBBY!" Dean yelled, struggling to find a grip on the floor as more of Sam disappeared into the portal.

Bobby appeared around the door frame and lunged forward, grabbing Dean's shoulder and heaving backwards and I ran for them both, reaching Dean as Sam disappeared, the arm Dean was still holding the only thing visible of him.

I don't know what it was, if it was me, or if the eclipse ended at that point, or if Sam's wrist just slipped through his brother's hold. But my hand closed around Dean's arm, and I pulled back and there was a blast from the portal, a wave of cold grey light and air that loosened Dean's grip.

Dean, Bobby and I were thrown backwards across the corridor and landed in a heap on the floor, the light brightening unbearably and disappearing completely, leaving the red drawing on the wall and nothing else.

And Sam was gone.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

* * *

"NO!" Dean's voice roared out and bounced back and forth between the hard walls. "Sam! SAM! SAMMY!"

He was on his feet and next to the portal's circle before I'd even made it to a sitting position, pounding his fists against it, the wall solid and unyielding, the blood of the circle smearing as he seemed to be trying to punch his way through to that other world.

"Dean, come on," Bobby said, rolling to his knees and looking around. "Crowley ain't gonna stay gone for long."

He looked at me. "You alright? Grab everything, we gotta get outta here."

I nodded and started to pick up all the stuff that I'd pulled out of the pack, putting the bowls and powders and jars back in with more concentration that it probably required. I didn't want to look at the man leaning against the smooth tiled wall behind me, or hear the complete despair in his voice as he snarled at Bobby.

"You bring the Nova?" Bobby asked me, giving up on Dean for the moment.

I shook my head. "The truck."

"That's somethin'," he said.

The walls trembled and we both looked up, seeing a fine, zigzagging crack appear across the ceiling.

"Dean!" Bobby yelled at him and grabbed my arm. "We're goin'! NOW!"

He dragged me along the hall and back through the room where Crowley had painted his attempt at the doorway. I couldn't look behind, stumbling after Bobby and trying to stay upright as the floor shook and a deep rumble seemed to fill the building. But I could hear the hard footsteps and as we reached the stairs, Dean put his hand on my back and shoved me forward.

Giant splits appeared in the walls, spurting dust and weird gusts of air that puffed into us as we ran along the upstairs corridor, heading for the way out. I could hardly see, coughing and choking as the dust got thicker and thicker, coating us from head to foot and impossible not to breathe in.

"Here!" Bobby turned and shouted as he skidded to a halt beside the fire door. The whole building was shaking, and bits of concrete were falling from the ceiling and from the walls. Dean moved past me, hitting the release bar hard and shoving the door open, Bobby and I running after him. My whole face was covered in dust, it was sticking to my eyelashes and I wiped at it ineffectually, forgetting about being able to see and speeding up as a groaning, creaking noise came from the building behind.

The Impala was still on its roof, near the perimeter fence, Bobby's tow truck just behind it. Dean was already through the high chainlink fence, holding the cut section aside, looking past us as Bobby pushed me through the opening and a thunderous blast filled the air.

Turning around, I watched in astonishment as the entire building fell into itself, walls crashing down, roof disappearing, and a massive cloud of dust filled the area, lit up like a storm cloud by the moonlight.

"Christ!" Bobby said, looking back over his shoulder as he eased himself through the fence. "What the hell?"

Dean looked at him stonily and moved back to the car, and Bobby shrugged to himself, turning for the truck.

Despite the tension that increased moment by moment with our expectations that Crowley and a hundred demons were going to turn up any second, we couldn't get the car done any faster than it had to be done. Bobby hooked up his small crane and turned it over, then Dean and I had to crawl under it, running chain and rope wire from the winch and shackling it tightly to the chassis.

Standing to one side when that was done, I watched Bobby slowly pull the car around and line it up, Dean moving around it, checking that it was fixed properly and the tension was even on both sides. His face was expressionless and cold when it was finally done, the car hoisted off its front wheels and firmly locked to the truck.

Bobby gestured to me and I climbed into the cab, squeezing close to him as Dean followed me in. Bobby glanced across me to look at Dean, his face twisting a little as he saw the rigidness of his face.

"We gotta get him back," Dean said abruptly, staring through the windshield with a frozen, fixed expression.

"We will," Bobby assured him, putting the truck into gear and pulling out. And that was pretty much the last thing any of us said for the next six hours.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

With the fuel stop in Nebraska, we got back to Bobby's yard just as the sun was coming up, the pitiless morning light showing up every flawed detail of the house and the junkers that lined the driveway and surrounded the sheds, showing up the lines and shadows in the faces of Bobby and Dean and probably in mine as well.

There was no question of going into the house and going to bed. And incredibly, although I'd been awake and on my feet, terrified, exhausted and filled with aches and pains from injuries I had no idea how I'd gotten, I couldn't have slept. Sam's face, agonised and edged with a light that was not natural kept filling my vision and I tried to keep my attention on what we could do to bring him back, tried not to think of what was happening to him. My thoughts were jumping around randomly, from what I remembered of things that had happened in the show, to the notes that I'd taken about the next season, wondering if there was anything in there to give a clue of how to get into Purgatory or how to get someone back from there.

Bobby and Dean unhitched the Impala, managing to push her back under the cover of the big shed, and I walked into the house, dumped the backpack on a chair in the dining room and made a fresh pot of coffee, pulling out bacon and eggs and bread from the fridge, the simple chore of making something to eat mindless and relaxing in a weird kind of way, and I didn't look at the way my hands were shaking.

They came in fifteen minutes later, and I set plates in front of them, poured coffee and took the chair at the other end of the table.

"Recap what we know about Purgatory," Dean said tersely through a mouthful of food.

Bobby glanced at me and shrugged. "We got the dragon's book, which is light on rituals but heavy on the more lurid details of what's in there. We got Ellie's ritual on opening the portal and we got the stuff to do it, but that's gonna need another lunar eclipse, which ain't until December."

Dean stopped chewing and stared at Bobby. "That's six months!"

"Yeah."

"What else?" He bit the words out, staring at the older hunter.

Bobby was silent for a moment, looking down at his plate. I knew exactly what he was thinking. I'd already been through my folder and there wasn't anything else on Purgatory that we didn't already know.

"I can't find anything else that can get us in there, or Sam out."

"Bullshit!" Dean said, his fist slamming down on the table top and making the plates and cups jump. "There's always a way, right? What we have to do is find it!"

"Yeah, no argument, son," Bobby agreed tiredly. "But we need help with this, we need people who've spent their lives looking at these myths –"

"Other hunters?"

Bobby shook his head. "No, if there're any hunters out there who know about this level of crap, they're keeping themselves well-hidden. No, we need –"

"Academics," I said, looking at him. "Professors, researchers."

Was it just one of those coincidences that Sam had told me that I'd been just that kind of person in his alternative life? I didn't know. I couldn't even begin to imagine how things were happening, what was controlling them or if any of this even meant anything. Cas had wanted to send me home and I didn't know why the angel had been so vehement about it. The little foreknowledge I'd had was pretty much used up now.

"Right." Bobby nodded.

Dean looked from him to me, his expression souring. "Half the crap people like that think they know is wrong, Bobby."

"Yeah, an' the other half ain't," Bobby argued. "You an' me'll keep going through what I got and what Rufus had," he said, a bit more pacifically. "Terry, start ringing the colleges and universities and see if you can nail down whatever experts you can."

Dean nodded, stabbing at the bacon on his plate. "Monsterland, you said it was."

Bobby was silent. Dean lifted the fork and looked at him.

"We gotta get him out of there fast."

"I know."

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_It's like the backside of your worst nightmares. It's all blood and bone and darkness, filled with the bodies and souls of all things hungry, sharp, and nasty._

That's what Bobby had said about Purgatory, back when they'd hunted the dragons, and I couldn't stop hearing his voice saying it over and over in my head. I was sitting at the small kitchen table, a stack of books beside me, the phone close to hand.

Finding the country's most highly-esteemed professors in the mixed subjects of Anthropology, Mythology, Sociology and Primitive Archaeology was no easy task. There were about a dozen I'd found with a pretty universal consensus that they were the ones who'd know what they were talking about. Bobby had given me a list of hunters who'd verified eight of those names, as resources they'd gone to and had gotten help from.

Two were in California, one at UCLA and the other at Stanford. One was at Columbia, in New York, there was another at Harvard and one at Yale on the east coast. The closest was tenured at the University of Virginia in Richmond, but he was on sabbatical, visiting Europe for a year. The seventh had died the week before in a car accident. The eighth had been committed to a mental institution two months ago with delusions. Dean thought that one was the most likely to have actually known or seen something but the administration had told me that Dr Miles Rochester couldn't have visitors.

I was waiting on call-backs from the two from California and the one from Columbia. They specialised in the cross-over between Christian-based religious mythology and anthropology and primitive mythology. They were, Bobby thought, the most likely people to have the information we were looking for – a myth or a legend or even a rumour – of a way in.

Outside, Dean was working on the car. He and Bobby had gone through every single one of Bobby's books that even had a passing mention of the place, and Bobby was at his desk, going over them again.

The phone rang beside me and I jumped at the sharp sound, snatching it up and picking up a pen, pulling my notepad closer.

"Singer Salvage," I said nervously, hoping that it was going to be one of the call-backs, preferably with all the answers we needed.

"Can I speak to Therese Alcott, please? This is Lauren Saunders, I'm returning a call," the cool, quiet female voice said.

"Speaking," I answered. "Dr Saunders, I'm working on a project involving the mythological aspect of Purgatory, and I was hoping to get some information from you."

"Purgatory?" she said, a little surprised. "I don't get many requests for information like that. What kind of a project?"

"Actually, it's for a film script," I ad-libbed frantically. "Uh, we want to get as much of the story set in the established legends as possible, and I've spoken to a few people who research this…um…area and your name kept coming up."

"That's flattering," she replied. "It's not a very well-known mythology, I'm afraid, but I'd happy to meet with you and show you what I've found."

I made a face. "Would it possible to send the information?"

"I'm sorry," she said, and she sounded sincere. "I'm working on a reference text and I can't let any of the information leave the office until it's finished. I could summarise what I've found, if that would be a help?"

It wouldn't, I thought. We needed to see the sources that conclusions had been drawn from, not just an opinion already formed. I tried to think of how long it might take to get to California from here and my mind blanked out.

"Um…I think the more detail we could get, the better the script would be," I said, a little fatuously to my own ears. "Can I call you back tomorrow to make an appointment if the writer can schedule it?"

"Yes, of course," she said easily. "If you don't mind telling me, what aspects of Purgatory are you interested in?"

"Uh, well, all of them, really." I rubbed the end of my fingers over my forehead. "Any information on getting in and out again would probably be the most helpful."

There was a short silence on the line. "Getting in and out?"

"Well, you know, mythologically speaking," I said, biting my lip at the slip. "The film is about someone rescuing someone else from Purgatory."

"Well…" She seemed to hesitate slightly then continued. "There are legends about the entrances and doorways to the other planes. The Celts had one, and one of the Native American people had one as well."

"That's the sort of thing we're looking for," I gushed in relief. "Something that's been around for a long time."

"I'll speak with you tomorrow then?"

"Yes, thank you very much for returning my call!"

"My pleasure."

The call ended and I put the phone down, leaning back in the chair and closing my eyes. This lying to people was not easy. Especially when I had to lie to someone and make it sound like it was rational. I mean, could you make a query about a mythological place sound like a perfectly reasonable thing to ask? Trust me, it's not a simple thing to do, and I didn't think I had much of a natural flair for it.

"Nice job of lying."

I jumped again at Dean's voice behind me, turning to see him leaning against the open back door. He sauntered over to the fridge, pulling out a beer and twisting off the top.

"What was that about?"

"One of the professors, in UCLA," I said, looking down at the few notes and many doodles I'd covered the page of my notepaper with. "She's happy to talk about her research but only in person. She's writing a text book about it and I guess she doesn't want copies of the source material out there before she's ready to publish."

There were a couple of minutes of silence, then he said, "Anything in Rufus' books?"

I looked at the stack beside me. "I haven't finished going through them yet."

"It's a long drive to LA," he said neutrally. "We'll eliminate everything here first."

Nodding, I pulled the next book from the pile and opened it. "Sure."

I didn't look around as the door closed behind him with a gentle click. None of us had really slept much, and I knew Bobby was worried about Dean, worried about the fact that he'd mostly stopped talking, spending a lot of the daylight hours in the shed working on his car, and most of the night-time hours reading through the books and making notes, trying to follow them up with the few hunters Bobby was still in contact with.

He'd spent his life protecting his brother, not just because his father had insisted on it, but because it a part of him to do it. It was hard for him to protect Sam when his brother was in a different dimension.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Usually, I never fall asleep when reading books or even watching TV. When I'm too tired to concentrate on something, I just close it and go to bed. It might've had something to do with the hours already put in, I guess. Or it might've been that I hadn't eaten much that day. Who knows? I didn't feel my eyelids closing at all.

_The nurse in the trunk wouldn't shut up, wailing and crying and begging, and Sam stood over her, staring down at her terrified eyes, hearing again his brother's voice, filled with loathing and disgust, the message on his phone playing over and over again, refusing to leave him alone. Maybe he was a monster. Maybe he'd always been a monster._

_I stood to one side, seeing Ruby's smirk, out of Sam's eyeline, behind his back._

"_Sam, you don't have to do this," I said, taking a step closer to him. "Ruby's lying to you, she planned all of this to free Lucifer, not to stop him!"_

_He couldn't hear me, of course, it was a memory but I couldn't stop myself from trying to reach him, stretching out my hand to touch his arm, feeling my fingers close in the cloth of his sleeve._

"_Sam, come on, Dean's waiting for you," I said, trying to stop that arm from rising, the light flashing off the blade, straight into my eyes. "Sam! Don't!"_

_The knife plunged down, straight into her throat and I turned away, heaving helplessly as blood splattered over the side of my face…_

…_the car and the nurse and Ruby vanished and flames jumped over the ice, Sam was hanging from the ceiling, hooks piercing his arms and ribs and sides, stretching him like a carcass in an abattoir. I could hardly look at him, there wasn't an inch of his skin that wasn't torn or burned or unmarked._

_You can't lie in here, Sammy, the deep voice that filled the room but seemed to come from nowhere said. Can't lie to yourself or to me._

_Lifting his head, I saw Sam's eyes, filled with blood, rolling around as he tried to see his tormentor._

_No._

_His voice was almost the same as it was in real life, except that it sounded cracked and hoarse and was barely a whisper._

_Laughter filled the cage and on the hooks, Sam's skin started to blister and peel away._

_Sam! SAM! I screamed at him. Don't listen. It's not real!_

_Real. Real. Real._

_You made the choices, Sam, all of them, all on your own. Can't hide from that, can't run._

_SAM! NO!_

"SAM! DON'T! NO!" I shrieked and a hard hand gripped my shoulder and shook me. The vision of the cage disappeared abruptly and I sat up, knocking the book I'd been reading from the table, staring around at Bobby's kitchen without taking in what I was seeing.

"Terry, wake up!" Dean's voice said from somewhere close by and I turned my head.

"What?"

"Nightmare," he explained, a little redundantly I thought as I realised where I was and what had happened.

I dragged in a breath, putting my hands to my face and feeling a damp sweat on my skin, in my hair. My stomach was churning uncomfortably as flashes of images kaleidoscoped in my mind.

There was a soft squawk as Dean pulled out the chair at the end of the table and sat down and I opened my eyes again, rubbing them a bit to buy some time to get those flashes out of my head.

A glass was pushed against my hand as I let it drop to the table and I looked at the inch of Bobby's rot-gut whiskey in the bottom of it, shaking my head.

"It'll help with the shock," Dean said quietly, his tone almost gentle.

"It'll make me sick," I said, pushing it back to him. Even the fumes were agitating my insides more than I thought wise. I got up, holding onto the back of the chair when it seemed possible that my legs weren't actually going to support me, and waiting until they felt stronger. Then I walked over to the sink and got a glass of water, drinking it down in several big gulps.

"What was it about?"

I looked down at the sink and refilled the glass, not sure if I should answer that or not. It wouldn't help Dean to know the things that'd happened to his brother in Hell.

"Monsters…you know, the usual nightmare suspects," I said, turning around and carrying the glass back to the table. I waved a hand at the books pile up next to my chair. "Mostly from reading about that stuff."

It was a much better lie than I'd managed with Dr Saunders, I thought, a little ruefully.

"You were calling out Sam's name, screaming it out," Dean said bluntly and I realised that my prevarications hadn't fooled him at all.

"How long have you been dreaming about him?" he asked when I didn't answer. There was something in his voice, something other than just the question and his worry about his brother and it made me look up at him. His face was as closed up as ever, giving absolutely nothing away.

"Since the dream root," I said, a bit unwillingly. I didn't need a lecture now.

"You should've said something," he said, looking away. "Bobby's got stuff to help you sleep without dreaming."

"I didn't know I was going to fall asleep."

He didn't have a comeback to that and I finished the water, feeling it settle my stomach down. What I felt instead was a huge exhaustion, and I wondered if 'Bobby's stuff' would let me sleep without dreaming.

"You saw what happened to him, didn't you?" he asked. "In the cage."

The one thing that had stood out about Dean through all the seasons I'd watched the brothers, was how hard he found it to ask anyone for anything. Looking at him now, I wondered at the effort it must have cost to get the question out.

"Yeah," I said. "I saw what happened, some of it, anyway."

"How bad was it?"

"Do you really want to know that?" I asked him. "What good can it do you?"

His gaze fell to the floor and he shook his head. "I have to know."

"So that you can torture yourself with it?"

He looked up then. "So I can help him with it."

"It was very bad," I said, not wanting to go into more detail than that. Dean hadn't been able to share the load when he'd come back from Hell. Hadn't been able to tell his brother about it. He'd said that he couldn't make Sam understand what it'd been like. I thought that Sam knew now, and he could no more talk to his brother about what had happened than Dean could.

"What happened?"

"The only way you can help Sam with that is if he tells you himself," I said, looking down at my glass. "You know that."

"He won't," he said, with a finality that seemed bleak.

I thought he was right about that. They couldn't talk to each other anymore.

"How did you get him out? Of the memories?" he asked a moment later, and I wondered how he'd known I had.

"I told him you'd forgiven him."

I swear I did not know I was going to say that before it came out with a splat in that silent and cold kitchen. I'd been trying to think of a way to tell him a lot more subtly, trying to figure out a way to even bring the subject up in a conversation, since the moment Sam and I had climbed into Bobby's truck and headed south.

His eyes darkened as he looked at me. "Why?"

"Because that's what he needed to hear."

"Wh-what – that's not –"

Looking at the confusion on his face, I realised that this was another missing link between him and Sam. "He thinks he's let you down too many times, Dean."

He got up then, and walked to the dining room and I thought he was just going to leave, but he stopped and turned around.

"I went back for him, every single time," he said abruptly. "I never cut him loose."

"I know."

He opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something more, then closed it again, his face kind of closing up.

"Upstairs bathroom cabinet, bottle's marked Ambein," he said, turning away. "Get some real sleep, we'll go early in the morning."

I blinked at the order, glancing down at my watch automatically. It was one a.m. and I wondered how early 'early' meant. I couldn't ask that because he'd already disappeared out of the dining room and I could hear his boots on the stairs.

I picked up Rufus' book on alternate dimensions and set it back on the table, getting up and turning off the light, walking through the dark dining room to the hall. The bottle was in the cabinet and I swallowed half the recommended dosage on the label, mainly so that I wouldn't be a zombie in the morning. It didn't occur to me until I was climbing into my bed that it'd been the most he'd ever opened up to me.

Every thought I'd had about the brothers had been overturned since I'd gotten here. I probably shouldn't have been surprised, I mean, at home they'd been fictional characters, interesting, downright fascinating in many ways, but without the…fullness?...roundness?...of real people. There are always things missing from a fictional account. Here there wasn't. Both of them were that bit harder than the show had portrayed. Dean's eyes were a much deeper green than Jensen's. And Sam had the three claw mark scars over his right cheek, from the shadow demon attack. And…I don't know…they were…

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

Early, I found out, was very early. The tablet had dragged me down fast and I didn't remember anything from the rest of the night, no dreams, no nothing. I woke up groggily for the second time with Dean's hand shaking my shoulder.

"Come on, get dressed, we're going," he said, staying just long enough to see that I didn't roll over and go back to sleep then leaving the room.

He'd been right, whatever was in the tablets, it'd worked. The clumsy, cotton-wool feeling that came after waking was going to take a while to rid of, I thought, stumbling against the dresser as I pulled on my jeans.

I heard the argument as I came down the stairs.

"It's not a good idea, Dean and you know it," Bobby's voice was low and growling. "She's not backup –"

"I don't need backup! I need someone who can talk to people without being threatening," Dean said to him. "Sam – Sam used to do that, wheedle info out with his emo vibes."

"And if Crowley decides to send some demons after you?"

"He won't see us," Dean said shortly. "Carved these into us for a reason and she's got them too."

I came into the dining room and looked at them, Bobby leaning on the counter, his face pugnacious, Dean sitting at the small table, one hand curled around a cup of coffee.

"Morning," I offered, keeping my gaze on the floor as I walked across the dining room and into the kitchen, heading for the coffee pot.

"You going along?" Bobby asked me as I reached the counter and found a clean cup.

"I gave Dr Saunders a whole back story for the information, Bobby," I said. "Film script research, the lot. She's expecting a writer's assistant."

He grunted noncommittally and turned away, opening a drawer and pulling out a silver chain. He handed it to me with a grimace.

"Put it on. Those scars'll keep you from being noticed, but you need that to stop from being possessed," he told me, sending a look Dean's way.

The chain held a small silver medallion, worked to the same design as the one I knew was tattooed on Sam and Dean. I slipped the chain over my head and dropped the pendant down the front of my shirt, feeling it warm up against my skin.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

_They dedicate their lives  
To running all of his  
He tries to please them all  
This bitter man he is  
Throughout his life the same  
He's battled constantly  
This fight he cannot win  
A tired man they see no longer cares _

I looked out the window beside me as the lyrics of the melancholy song flowed over me, each line pointed and achingly related to the man who was driving. It was probably just tiredness but I could feel my chest getting tighter.

"Too loud?" Dean asked.

I shook my head, the song was a quiet one for Metallica and I liked it usually. "Driver picks, that's the rule, right?"

"Right."

_What I've felt  
What I've known  
Never shined through in what I've shown  
Never be  
Never see  
Won't see what might have been  
What I've felt  
What I've known  
Never shined through in what I've shown  
Never free  
Never me _

I closed my eyes and in the blackness behind my lids, scenes from the first three seasons played out involuntarily, scenes of the two brothers, scenes of their lives.

From the moment Dean had called his father, his voice cracked and filled with a mixture of panic and fear and longing, on the way back to Lawrence, that had been it for me. The tough-guy mask had been stripped away and I'd seen him so vulnerable and so completely without armour and that…defencelessness had changed something inside of me.

I guess it was the same for the millions of fans who watched the show. Nothing special about me. That moment changed the way I saw the show entirely, moving it from a fun and interesting story about family and hunting and the underlying ominous feeling of destiny, to the only way I could know this character, this person who could fight evil and yet be so afraid, of himself, of the way he felt and what he did. The season's episodes kept building on that revelation and I got more and more addicted to the knowing of Dean Winchester.

I know how lame that sounds, believe me. I mean, fictional character, right? Talk about unrequited! I worked for the show and I talked to and joked around with the actors, and trust me, they aren't the characters, not even in the little things really. Jensen wouldn't know a carburettor from a distributor, to be honest with you. And while he likes classic rock and a lot of the bands Dean likes, he doesn't like them with the same passion.

It was just Dean and Sam. Fighting their upbringing, fighting each other, fighting themselves…fighting a destiny that seemed too big for anyone to face. Romantic, I know, but it hit me somewhere inside, a place I hadn't even known had existed and it changed my whole view of everything.

Here, they weren't exactly the same. Here, the blood was real and the monsters and the ghosts and the armies of Heaven and Hell were not special effects and good lighting. Here, I was sitting next to a man whose entire life had been about fighting the darkness and who'd just lost his brother in another dimension that the only things we knew about it was that it was filled with things that could and might kill him.

If you're a long time fan of the show, you might've felt the overwhelming desire to just hug them and tell them they were doing the right thing, they were good people and they deserved to have some peace in their lives. But sitting here, next to Dean, I have to tell you that there was no way in hell anyone could do that with him. He radiated a 'go away' vibe like you wouldn't believe, closed up and inside himself, and even starting a conversation about how long to the next gas stop was a daunting prospect.

I hadn't thought of what it would be really like, here in this world. I'd been thinking about what I knew from the show, mostly. The reality was that I was a stranger to them. I knew a lot about their lives, but they hadn't shared those things with me. I knew, to some extent anyway, what had driven them, their choices and their feelings, but it hadn't come from them. And I knew that I couldn't help, not the way I'd thought I could, with just telling them that it wasn't their fault that things had turned out the way they had, that they'd done the best they could.

We passed into Colorado and the sun was shining right into the car as it got lower, the mountains getting bigger and closer with every mile under the wheels. It was seventeen hundred miles to LA and I wondered how long Dean would drive for. I'd offered to take a shift, but he'd watched me fumble through the cotton-wool hangover of the sleeping tablet for most of the day and had curtly declined my offer.

He'd switched from Metallica to Bad Company about twenty miles back and in the soft, dusky light that seemed highly appropriate.

_Tell me that you are not a thief  
Oh, but I am…bad company  
It's the way I play, dirty for dirty  
Oh somebody double-crossed me  
Double-cross  
Double-cross  
Yeah…we're bad company  
Kill in cold blood_

The track finished and the next one came on, the distinctive guitar high and sweet telling me which song it was before Rodgers warm and slightly rough voice made it out of the speakers. I love Bad Company but I have to say I was also slightly surprised that Dean played them, they had a lot of love songs on their albums.

_I live my life the way that I choose  
I'm satisfied nothing to lose_

_I don't ask no favour  
I don't know the reason why  
If I don't ask no questions  
I, I don't get no lies, I don't get no lies_

_Now you give your love tenderly  
Every way that you move is closer to me_

The stereo snapped off as Dean hit the button and silence filled the car. I looked over at him, his face stony again.

"Too slow," he said suddenly. "Puts me to sleep."

"You want something else?" I looked down at the battered cardbox box that lay on the seat between us, filled with cassette tapes in dusty, oily, cracked plastic covers.

I didn't think he was going to answer, then he shrugged a shoulder and nodded. "Sure."

Looking through the tapes, I pulled out a very hard-worn tape, opening the plain black cover gingerly. Popping out the Bad Company, I slid the new tape in and pressed 'Play'.

The first soft beat count on the high-hats filled the interior and I saw his shoulders drop slightly, his hands relax on the wheel. The bass and snare came in together, and his thumb tapped the beat out on the steering wheel as he glanced at me.

"Good choice."

The hard edge had disappeared from his voice and I leaned back into the corner between the back of the seat and the passenger door, listening to Brian Johnson's raw, scratchy snarl with a disorientating flash of my past life and show memories intertwined. They'd been unable to justify the copyright costs for this music for the last season, giving up on pretty much on the rock backgrounds entirely. It was good to hear it again, but it was better to see the corners of his mouth tuck in as he mouthed the words, eyes narrowed against the sun's glare.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~

"Single's all I got left," the motel manager said apologetically, and Dean nodded, not looking at me as he handed over a credit card and picked up a pen to fill out his registration details. He took the key and we walked back to the car, getting in and driving around the block of rooms to the rear.

When he opened the door, the double bed sat in the middle of the room, but there was a sofa to one side, as well as the usual tiny table and small kitchen counter with coffee-making facilities.

"I'll take the sofa," I said, dropping my pack on the floor and walking over to look at the bathroom.

"No, I –"

I turned back to him, waving my hand at it. "Don't be ridiculous, you won't fit on it."

He gave in and dropped the canvas duffle he was carrying beside the bed, pulling out a container of salt and prising off the lid.

I looked in the bathroom. Twelve hours of driving on top of the now-gone sedative and I couldn't have cared less if I'd slept on the floor. I wanted a shower, something substantial to eat and as many hours as he was going to let me have in sound, dreamless sleep.

"You hungry?"

Looking back out, I nodded. "Starving."

"Preferences?"

A whole bunch of things popped into my head, but the reality was it didn't matter so long as there was a lot of it. "No, anything's fine."

"That's a change," he muttered, pulling his keys from his pocket and heading for the door. He stopped and looked back at me. "Lock up and don't break the salt lines."

I resisted the impulse to stick my tongue out, feeling the slightly out-of-it punchiness from too long sitting in one position clouding my judgement.

"Right."

He looked at me for a long moment, obviously wondering if he could trust me with that single instruction, then turned away, opening the door and closing it behind him. I waited to hear the engine starting up and the door swung open again.

"I said lock up!"

"Okay!" I told him, walking over to it. "Give me a sec!"

"No," he snapped. "Nothing else will. You do it the way I say, every single time."

"Alright."

The door slammed shut again and I turned the thumb bolt and put the chain on. See what I mean? They barely showed Dean's ability to make anyone feel like a complete idiot on the show. Here I got to see it on an hourly basis.

It was nine o'clock and already I knew it was going to be a long, long drive to California.

~o-o-o-0-o-o-o~


End file.
